Because I Love You - Chasing After You
by The Flare Blade
Summary: Hiruzen knew that Tazuna's request was much more dangerous and important than it first appeared to be. He needed experienced ninja for the mission, but his hands were tied because of politics... until he sees a loophole. Using an educational project as cover, he will send two teams to Wave! A Naruto retelling with Hinata as a main character but with canon teams. (Under revision!)
1. Chapter 1 - The Professor's Plan

Before you begin reading this fic, there's a little thing you should know.

 **I have a few topics I'd like to talk about regarding this story**... such as why I have decided to write it, about the pacing, original characters, fundamental changes to the plot, my update schedule, action scenes, use of Japanese, future revisions of posted chapters, fixing mistakes and etc... it's a lot.

 **However, there is no real need for me to inflate this chapter's word count with that, so everything is neatly organized in my profile.** I really recommend reading it at some point soon if you decide that you want to keep reading this fic in the future; there's a table of contents there so you can find and skip parts that do not interest you, if you wish.

 **This includes info about the major revision that the story is currently going through.** As such, there will be a drop in quality and even consistency if you just read everything in one go; I recommend checking it out to see how far it is "safe" to read.

If you for some reason don't know how to access it, just click on my username above and you will be sent there!

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Hello everyone, and welcome to the first book of the story, "Chasing After You," which revolves around the Part 1 of Naruto.

As the summary stated, Hinata will be a main character this time around. To explain why she gets that opportunity in this retelling, I'll need to talk about the changes I did to the Wave mission and Hiruzen's educational project. Both of those things will end up having big impacts on the story, so I devoted our prologue to talk about them, and a bit to indirectly introduce you to Hinata's character and past.

If I may be so bold, I request that you stick with the fic at least until you've read the entire prologue arc (Chapter 1-6). In this arc, I'll show you where I intend to take the main characters, and you'll also have a taste of my style and how I handle things like humor, drama, friendships/romance, character development, action sequences and other important aspects of the story going forward.

The key events of this prologue arc happen in Chapter 4 and 6. I believe that only after all of that you'll have seen enough to safely determine if it's worth continuing reading or not—though I thank you for time and patience nonetheless.

Finally, a couple warnings about this chapter:

*The existence of Hiruzen's educational project is more important than what it actually is about in the first half, thanks to what I already mentioned in the summary. The project will only be explained in the second half.

*I used the present tense in a few moments of the chapter despite sticking to the past tense for 99% of the story—I felt it was justifiable and more suitable for those specific parts, so I apologize for the tense shifts.

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Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Masashi Kishimoto does. I know disclaimers are legally useless, but I still think this deserves to be said... once, and only once. I'll put another disclaimer if I get the rights of the series, ok? (Spoiler alert: Never.)

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 _Prologue arc_

Chapter 1: The Professor's Plan (v3.0.4)

* * *

"For someone to be a ninja, they must be able to put their life on the line for the sake of the village."

This is a lesson taught to all academy students of Konoha before they even come close to becoming genin and something they simply get used to as time passes. When a ninja gets a new mission, they know they might not be coming back from it... and while the concept is extremely scary at first, it eventually becomes nothing more than routine; it's something that is easy to accept and live with. After all, danger has always been part of the job description.

Whenever a ninja from Konoha enters the Hokage's office to learn about a new assignment, they see their Kage, but not just that. Behind the person wearing the white robes and a red hat with the kanji for "Fire," they would find multiple large windows, and from beyond the transparent glass they would be able to view the entire village.

The First Hokage of Konoha, Hashirama Senju, believed that this sight would motivate his shinobi to do their best, not only for the village that they are fighting to protect, but also for their loved ones that waited for their safe return. It would remind his shinobi of what was at stake for every mission they took and why they had to risk their lives every day… of why their pain and sacrifices were worth it in the end.

This impact was something that a young Hiruzen Sarutobi experienced first-hand, but many decades later, now sitting on the blue chair on the other side of the Hokage's desk— _his_ desk—he couldn't help but see things from a second perspective as well.

As Hiruzen came to understand not too soon after assuming the office as the Sandaime Hokage, being a Kage means that one, at times, needs to look at a mission scroll, realize that whoever is assigned to that mission is practically guaranteed to die during or after the mission... and still carefully construct a team to take the job. It doesn't end there, of course, because he would need to brief his men about what their suicidal mission is, fully aware that they would probably never see their village, families and friends again.

After all, while blood would be in his hands regardless of his decision, he is still the one sending them to their supposed deaths. Just like every time he killed an enemy when he was still an active ninja, the guilt never goes away. It actually gets worse… but all he could do was hold on to the Will of Fire and trust that his men would return, even if a more realistic side of him told him otherwise. Usually that side ended up proven wrong, especially now that they weren't fighting a war, but not always.

 _'I am far too old for the weight of this hat...'_ he lamented, taking a drag from his pipe. One look at the man and you would think that, considering his white hair and wrinkled face, Hiruzen was absolutely right. One as old as he was shouldn't be spending his last years locked up in an office dealing with mountains of paperwork and the impossible choices he needed to make on a daily basis, but thanks to the untimely death of his successor, no one else was able to protect his home.

No matter how tired he was, he needed to do it—for the village.

The sound of someone sighing snapped him from his thoughts.

"He's taking way too long," the person spoke in a feminine voice.

Hiruzen had to chuckle at the person across his desk. "Patience. You know how he is. Twenty minutes is actually not too bad for his standards—not yet, at least."

"I suppose you're right…" she mumbled under her breath. "It could be worse."

The woman in front of him was Kurenai Yuhi, a young jonin and the village's most skilled user of genjutsu. Her black, messy hair and striking crimson eyes made for a beautiful visage, despite the impatient scowl marring her features. She wore a red mesh armor blouse that only had one sleeve (on the right) and a thick, sleeveless dress with a design that resembled wide white bandages with black thorn patterns, positioned just right to expose a little of her cleavage covered by the black mesh armor underneath. While her dress only resembled bandages, the ones covering her hands and forearms were genuine.

Luckily, they didn't have to wait for much longer. Barely a minute later, a man entered through the open window. He was dressed in the traditional blue jonin uniform of Konoha under his green flak jacket, with the headband tilted diagonally to cover his left eye. Between that and the mask over his face, he made for a mysterious figure. Despite his aforementioned chronic tardiness and his disheveled silver hair that spiked upwards, he still gave the aura of an experienced and dangerous ninja—as far as Konoha went, few individuals deserved that description more than him.

"Sorry I'm late, Hokage-sama," he said, before giving a lame excuse that Hiruzen tuned out completely. Kakashi Hatake never changed. Always late, always with an improbable excuse. Hiruzen had long since accepted his incorrigibleness, but Kurenai gladly took the chance to chastise him.

"Honestly, Kakashi. Would it kill you to be considerate, for once? I have a team to get back to."

"I suppose you do," he said with a subtle shrug before taking a little book out of a pocket. A _porn_ book, which he proceeded to read despite being in Hiruzen's presence.

Seeing Kurenai's eye twitch at the sight of Icha Icha Paradise—a book Hiruzen was more familiar with than he could admit aloud—he cleared his throat to give start their meeting.

"Kurenai, Kakashi... I called you two today because I have an important mission for both of your teams. But before anything else, I must know one thing." His gaze fell onto Kakashi, whose head was buried in the book. "Is Team 7 finally prepared for a C-rank mission?"

"Well... they are still not quite where I want them to be in terms of teamwork," Kakashi confessed, almost apologetic. "Still, they are starting to tolerate each other a little, and at least a couple things about teamwork are finally getting through their thick heads… so I believe that they can handle a C-rank." He sighed. "Finally…"

The Hokage had to smile. He could still remember the tantrum one Naruto Uzumaki threw a week prior, once he had enough of how mundane and boring the D-rank missions were after a nasty encounter with a certain unruly cat. Hiruzen was sure the boy had insisted on it every single day afterward.

"I'm glad to hear that they are warming up to each other. Kurenai has already confirmed to me that her team is also ready for a C-rank mission yesterday," the woman nodded at that, "and I happen to have one that I want to assign to both of your teams tomorrow."

He grabbed a scroll that was on his desk and offered it to Kurenai. "The client is named Tazuna, an accomplished bridge builder from the Land of Waves. He's requesting a team of shinobi to escort him back to his home country and offer him protection while he builds a bridge that will connect the island to the continent. The motive behind his request is that he fears bandits might ambush him before he gets home or once the bridge is close to our country's coast. He is offering enough payment to justify a C-rank mission."

Kurenai briefly scanned the scroll, confirming all of the information that the Hokage had just shared with them before looking curiously at her boss as she passed the scroll to Kakashi. "This mission isn't complex enough to warrant two genin teams," she stated, one eyebrow raised in suspicion. "Does this have something to do with the post-academy educational project you mentioned to us in the previous meeting, Hokage-sama? For our genin teams?"

Hiruzen's features darkened. "Indeed. As the mission is somewhat time-consuming, it will give you ample time for you two to start the deeper courses on ninjutsu and genjutsu that the project mentioned, even if only for half of the genin in question."

Kakashi and Kurenai both tensed. Between how their teams hadn't been called for this meeting and the grave expression that their Hokage wore, they now knew for sure that the next part would not leave them happy.

"However, that's just on paper." Hiruzen leaned forward, elbows on the desk and hands clasped in front of his face. "The client lied about the mission's parameters. This is, in reality, an extremely important A-rank mission. And with my educational project acting as a cover, I'm giving this A-rank mission to you, two of my strongest shinobi, under the guise of the jonin-sensei that are accompanying two teams of genin on a C-rank mission."

Kurenai's eyes widened. The thought of bringing her team to a dangerous A-rank mission—of possibly getting them killed—made her blood run cold. She bit her lip, stopping herself from demanding an explanation. Not only was Hiruzen her superior, but she trusted him. Surely he had a good reason to endanger mere children like that.

Kakashi, on the other hand, didn't hesitate to speak his mind since his questions were on the practical side. "Why, exactly, is this mission improperly ranked and why is it as important as you say, Hokage-sama?"

"The bridge is the cause of this mission's high level of danger." Hiruzen grabbed a scroll that had been on the corner of his desk and spread it open, revealing a world map. "As you can see on this map, the Land of Waves is a rather small island country. Much like the Land of Water, they rely heavily on ships to trade with other countries, and as such, ports are of the utmost importance to the country's economy. But two years ago, their situation changed dramatically... I suppose both of you have already heard of a man named Gatou, yes?"

"You mean the president of the Gatou Corporation? The shipping tycoon?" Kakashi asked, pocketing his book. The topic merited his full attention. If someone as powerful as Gatou was involved…

Grimly, Hiruzen nodded. "The very same. My sources discovered that he used his money to buy all of the country's ports, effectively cutting off the Land of Waves from the rest of the world. He practically owns the country nowadays. He has full control of the country's economy and he can freely drain its resources with barely any costs," the Hokage said, in a low tone that allowed hints of anger to seep through his words. For someone like him, who sacrificed so much of his life to ensure the well-being of his village, Gatou's tyranny was infuriating. Hiruzen wanted to personally end the man's greedy existence, but for many reasons, that wasn't a possibility.

"Ah, I think I see where this is going," Kurenai muttered, crossing her arms. "That's where our client and the bridge that he plans to build enter the scene, correct?"

"Exactly. The bridge is a threat to Gatou's monopoly. Losing his control over of country will cripple his business as a whole, and thus he will undoubtedly seek to eliminate our client. That man has more than enough money to hire assassins, which is why I consider this mission as an A-rank at this moment. As I'm sure you have guessed by now, the proposed payment for the mission is all that the Land of Waves can afford to give us at the moment, which is the reason behind Tazuna's attempt to lie to us and say this is a C-rank."

Mentally, Hiruzen noted how futile it was to lie to him. He knew that Tazuna had no other option, but he was the Hokage, for god's sake! Being informed about the world around him was part of the job!

"Normally," he continued, "despite wanting to help, I would not accept this kind of mission. After all, I do have to think of my own village first... but that's exactly why we must help them right now." Hiruzen pointed at the world map, specifically at the Land of Water. "Gatou is a key player in the economy of many other places, one of which is Kirigakure, the Land of Water's hidden village. As you know, the Mist is currently in the middle of a bloody civil war, and according to our intelligence, Gatou is the Fourth Mizukage's key supplier. Be it food or weapons, it could be said that Yagura's army is practically funded by Gatou, and if he loses his hold on the Land of Waves, Kiri's insurgency will be given an incredible advantage."

"So," Kurenai raised an eyebrow, "we are trying to depose the Mizukage indirectly by crippling Gatou's business, is that it?"

"Yes," Hiruzen confirmed. "The one who will become the Fifth Mizukage if the insurgency wins, as of now, is a woman by the name of Mei Terumi. Considering what my sources tell me about her personality and morals, as well as the situation that the Hidden Mist would be in if she assumes the position... I see in these events a chance to forge an alliance with the Mist. The previous rebel leader was of dubious character, but he was recently caught and executed, which is why this situation wasn't interesting to Konoha up until now," he explained. While some might think his spymaster might have been focusing more on the woman's sizable bust rather than her character, he knew that Jiraiya's opinion about Mei was trustworthy.

…Both about her character AND her bust size, which Jiraiya had emphasized quite a bit in his report.

"What if this Mei doesn't survive the war?" Kakashi eventually questioned.

At the thought, Hiruzen suppressed a sigh. "Who would assume the village then is not known. Firstly, it would depend on which side wins. With Gatou out of the equation I don't believe the Mizukage's forces will hold out, but the person who would assume the village in Yagura's place might be more reasonable than him. As far as my sources were able to discern, Mei is the only remaining Kage-level shinobi on the rebel's side, in terms of combat ability. We'd need to wait and see who would be the new Mizukage before making a move, but offering help during the reconstruction to improve our ties with them should still be feasible."

Kakashi nodded, and Kurenai followed up with a question of her own. "But Hokage-sama, why can't we offer our support to the resistance in the Hidden Mist directly instead?"

That what she truly wanted to know was 'why does my team need to be involved in all of this?' was something Hiruzen didn't fail to notice.

"So far our only ally in the five great elemental nations is Suna," he continued, deciding that an explanation of Konoha's relationship with the other major villages was in order. "After the Sandaime Mizukage's death, our relationship with Kiri became neutral once again. However, the current Mizukage, Yagura, violently opposed the idea of making an alliance with us for unknown reasons, and we are still not in good terms with Kumo and Iwa, thanks to previous wars and some smaller incidents over the years," he pointed at the hidden villages of the Water, Earth and Lighting countries on the map as he spoke. "Openly siding with the resistance would be enough for Yagura to declare war on us. It's far from a wise move considering how the civil war affected his village, but that man is literally insane, so it's a very real possibility that must be considered.

"But the real danger here is that, despite the Mist's precarious situation, there is a chance that the Hidden Cloud or the Hidden Rock would see an opportunity to oppose us by supporting Yagura, and potentially invading Konoha as well as providing manpower to shut down the resistance in Kiri. It does not help that the Hidden Sand is currently economically crippled, and thus, we'd be surrounded from three sides with little backup. This why we must capitalize on this opportunity to have the Mist on our side and why participating in their civil war is unfeasible. Lastly, the Mizukage himself is also the jinchuuriki of the Three-tails... and worse, he can fully control it. I believe you can see why we cannot take this risk, correct?"

Resisting the sudden urge to gulp, Kurenai realized that she had no way to counter her Hokage's logic. Still, the safety of her genin depended on her, and she found herself pressed to continue questioning the Sandaime in hopes of changing his mind.

"...Hokage-sama, I... I do understand," Kurenai stammered, "but why must our _genin_ teams do this kind of mission? It's too dangerous for them!"

Being completely honest with herself, Kurenai didn't care much for the bigger picture. She had no issues with risking her own life during this or any other mission, but while the situation of the world around her was truly worrying, directly dealing with that was not her job. Protecting her team, on the other hand, was, and she knew Kakashi would also do everything in his power to protect his own squad.

But when you add that to an equation that already had a defenseless client and unknown assassins, their A-rank mission could easily become S-ranked in difficulty.

Unlike Kurenai, Sarutobi's expression kept his feelings very well hidden—a leader could not show weakness in front of their subordinates after all. "I am perfectly aware of the dangers, but we do not have another option in this case. The council of elders has no idea of the true nature of this C-rank mission or my intentions, and if they knew about it, they would veto my decision immediately." Neither jonin were very informed about the inner workings of Konoha's government, so they didn't question the Hokage on this matter.

In truth, Konoha's council of elders was a system created by the First Hokage. It was composed of three members, one chosen by the Hokage, another chosen by the Land of Fire's Daimyo, and the last one decided through a vote between all of the village's clan heads. All councilmen were meant to aid the Hokage in managing the village through delegated roles in the high administration, but the members chosen by the Daimyo and the clan heads had the additional duty of helping defend the interests of the party that put them in charge. Though this resulted in the possibility of the council vetoing the Hokage's decisions if all of them disagreed with him, among other lesser limitations, it made the village a much safer investment for clans and the Daimyo, providing the village with much-needed manpower and funds, and the First Hokage had deemed it a worthy sacrifice to help the village grow.

As for the council nowadays... Hiruzen had spent too many decades with his teammates Koharu Utatane and Homura Mitokado. they were predictable. The former was always reluctant in dealing with other countries unless they were forced to or there was no risk involved, while the latter had a heavy bias regarding the Hidden Mist due to past personal losses. If they were the only elders, Hiruzen knew he would convince at least Koharu.

The last elder, Danzo Shimura, would be just as impossible to convince as Homura. He'd never risk so many key resources of the village (the Kyuubi, the last Sharingan and an unsealed Byakugan) and if Hiruzen knew his old friends well, Danzo and Homura would be able to convince Koharu to veto the mission. Luckily, Hiruzen knew that Homura would be on his side instead if Danzo proposed an alliance with Yagura, so at least that wasn't a worry.

Hiruzen firmly refused to ally himself with someone that supported brutal practices such as the Bloodline Purges or Kiri's deadly graduation exams. Those two things already said enough about the Mizukage's character—he was not someone Hiruzen wanted on his side. However, considering the man was also a perfect jinchuuriki and mentally unstable, he also was far too dangerous to make an enemy of.

"But now," he proceeded, "thanks to my project, I have the perfect cover to send two highly capable jonin to deal with this "C-rank" mission. As I already mentioned in our previous meeting, the council approved the possibility of joint missions for the four genin teams involved in my project. It just so happens that your genin have a good combination of supporting abilities that would help both of you during the mission and the skills that will help them survive the ordeal; in particular Team 8," he said, eyes falling to Kurenai.

Albeit reluctantly, the kunoichi finally understood her Hokage's intention. "I see... between Shino's kikaichu, Hinata's Byakugan and Kiba's sense of smell, we could avoid unnecessary conflicts and prepare more thoroughly if running is not an option, correct?"

"That was my logic, yes." The Hokage confirmed. "I also believe that Naruto's shadow clones can assist in that regard, and there's also the fact that his teammates were the best the academy had in this year. Between all of the jonin-sensei and their teams, this is the best combination that I have available for this mission at the moment, Kurenai."

In truth, Hiruzen wanted Might Guy's team over Kurenai's since a Byakugan user would be more than enough support in most situations, but they had been sent to a border patrol mission a week before and thus were unavailable for the next ten days. Still, between the skill of the two top students, the tracking/scouting abilities of the other four and the strength of their sensei, these two teams had the highest odds of returning from the Land of Waves without suffering too many deaths, or dare he hope, any casualties at all.

Mulling over the Third Hokage's words, Kurenai's shoulder sagged as she finally nodded. "I understand," she practically sighed.

Hiruzen allowed himself to relax a little, internally glad that this discussion was nearing a peaceful end. Having to pull the "I'm the Hokage, shut up and do it" card was never very pleasant.

"It's a dangerous mission, but I have faith that you will all accomplish it and return safely. But while I don't like to lie to those kids, it's better if you don't mention the level of danger they are in at first." All three of them were aware that having that kind of pressure on the genin's shoulders from the get-go would just get them killed. "Still, do reinforce the fact that such things could happen during missions in order for them to keep their guard up," Hiruzen recommended. "You can never be too careful, even on a normal mission."

The two jonin nodded to their leader, and the Hokage moved on to conclude the meeting. "Finally... I cannot give any reasons for the council to cancel my project thanks to a lack of results early on, so I want both of you to work with the other's team tomorrow and with everyone during your downtime while in the Land of Waves. Try to get a feel for the new kids, both for the sake of the project and the mission itself. You will depart the day after tomorrow, at seven in the morning, but do come to the Mission Assignment Room with your teams later tomorrow for me to give them the mission officially. You can tell them about the mission before that happens if you wish, but everything that wasn't on the scroll is classified unless strictly necessary for their survival during the mission. Any questions?"

There were none.

"Then you are dismissed."

Nodding, the pair left the office through the front door. It pained Hiruzen to watch. Kakashi seemed unaffected, but a simple comparison of how Kurenai entered and left the room—how fear had corrupted her confident stride—made Hiruzen even more aware of the burden he was placing on their shoulders.

It wasn't the mission, but the young lives he was risking for that goal. It was a massive gambit. But his instincts—the one thing he had learned to trust above all else during his career—told him he was doing the right thing.

Still, he worried. Finally alone, he grabbed his pipe again and slumped in his chair, sighing loudly. "That went well enough... hopefully, their debriefing will be no different."

If there was one thing he thought worse than discovering that his men died in action... it was the fallout. Having to tell to a person's family that their father, mother, husband, wife, brother, sister, son or daughter… that they would never see that person again. It was, by far, the hardest part of being Hokage.

In this case, the situation could be even worse since the heirs to the Aburame and Hyuuga clans were involved, but to Hiruzen, the true problem lied with the two genin that didn't even have a family in Konoha to return to.

One was Sasuke Uchiha, the last person in Konoha with the mighty Sharingan in his blood. While losing access to that kekkei genkai would be a huge loss for the village, what truly worried the old Hokage was how his elder brother might react to the boy's possible death. Itachi Uchiha, despite what everyone else thought, was still a loyal ninja of Konoha, but losing Sasuke… Hiruzen wasn't sure that boy would be capable of handling that. His psyche was frail enough as it was.

The other case, Naruto Uzumaki... was the one possible death that would hit him the hardest, both as a Kage and as an individual. His concern as a Kage was obvious: the Kyuubi. But as a person… it would be losing a boy he came to consider as his own grandson. A grandson that Hiruzen had failed enough as it was—his lack of foresight ended up ruining Naruto's childhood, and it was one of his biggest regrets in life.

Hiruzen's hope was that he would one day witness the young Uzumaki getting the recognition that he so desperately wanted—and considering his burden, rightfully deserved. But if Naruto died so young… he'd go down in history as an evil being that deserved to die, rather than the hero that he is for shouldering such a heavy burden.

Perhaps, if he had gone through with his decision to remove Danzo from the Konoha Council after confronting him about his dubious role in the Uchiha Massacre, he might have been able to convince the remaining members that his plan was sound and spare those kids from this mission, depending on who would take over Danzo's chair. But now… that was just another failure added to Hiruzen's pile of regrets.

He put his pipe down.

 _'This is no time to ponder the mistakes of the past'_ , Hiruzen told himself as he went back to fight against the one opponent that even the God of Shinobi, as they sometimes called him, could never beat: paperwork.

Being the Hokage was never easy... but even as his fears and doubts nagged at him, he knew that he needed to set them aside and trust in his subordinates.

In the Will of Fire.

* * *

On their way out of the Hokage's Tower, Kurenai and Kakashi talked for a bit and decided on a simple schedule for the next day. First, they'd swap teams for the morning, meet up at lunch to get the mission from the Hokage, go back to one of the training grounds to have lunch and then train together for the rest of the day.

As soon as the discussion was over, Kakashi simply asked her to tell her team to avoid eating breakfast and disappeared in a gust of leaves. If she knew her old friend well, he was headed to the memorial stone to reminiscence or talk to his fallen teammates, as he often did. She was sure his genin team was waiting for him, but she was also sure he didn't care about making them wait just a couple extra hours.

 _'As long as he doesn't pull that stunt with my team, I suppose that's fine. Not that I'm one to talk now,'_ she sighed.

Kurenai had left Team 8 during their lunch break after an ANBU appeared to inform her of the Hokage's summons, but it had already been over one hour since then. She felt a bit guilty for not going any faster—she could have gotten to the training grounds that her team used with a Body Flicker after all—but she decided to take the long route and settled for a walk instead. It wasn't a particularly fast way of traveling, especially for a ninja, but she needed to clear her mind a little before facing Team 8 again. She was still shaken from the meeting, and she couldn't project that aura of fear around her genin.

Her genin… the thought still brought a smile to her face.

It still surprised how much she became attached to "her kids" despite only knowing them for a couple weeks. Or rather, she knew Shino and Kiba for a couple weeks, since the Hokage had assigned her to teach Hinata a couple months before the graduation. As much as she cared for the boys, it wasn't on the same level as their teammate. She felt as if Hinata was her own daughter.

However, at first Kurenai had considered teaching Hinata as an insult. Firstly, the Hokage had said that "nobody else was available," which was an obvious lie. Secondly, she could not teach the Gentle Fist to the girl and wouldn't be allowed to teach her much about genjutsu because of the Hyuuga clan's traditions, so why her? Was it some sort of punishment?

The only thing that had crossed her mind was that the girl needed academic help, but surely there would be better options than her. Ultimately, that mystery had piqued Kurenai's curiosity enough that she ended up accepting to meet up with Hiashi Hyuuga, the clan head and in this case, her client. She hadn't intended to accept his proposal—as a jonin, she had the right to deny a job when Konoha wasn't in a crisis or war.

Her encounter with Hiashi on his mansion's dojo had changed her perspective completely. Much like the bridge builder from the Land of Waves, he too had lied about the mission's parameters. What he wanted was not a teacher for his heiress… he just needed someone to take out the trash.

Useless. Failure. Inconvenience. A waste of time. Those were only some of the terms Hiashi had used to describe his own _child_. The memory alone made Kurenai's blood boil, but when it happened? It had angered her enough that she accepted to teach the girl before she even realized the words were leaving her mouth, purely out of spite for the man.

Kurenai had decided to do everything she could to prove Hiashi wrong, even if she didn't know how… but as she left that dojo, she found not only an answer to that problem, but a better reason to go through with it: Hinata herself.

The girl had been right beside the dojo's door, and by accident or design, she clearly had overheard every word. Her shoulders were slumped and her head hung low in defeat, body as still as a statue and so destabilized that she hadn't even noticed the woman's presence. Her eyes… it still hurt Kurenai to remember the raw sorrow she saw reflected there. Hinata didn't cry, but somehow it just made Kurenai's heart hurt even more as she watched.

Be it pity, empathy or even some sort of maternal instinct that awoke inside her at the moment, Kurenai felt that she could— _should_ —help that girl.

She didn't believe in coincidences. Their paths crossed for a reason. That the Hokage told her later that day that she was guaranteed to be the Hinata's sensei if she graduated all but confirmed it.

As the days passed and they began to interact, Kurenai realized the girl's problem wasn't a lack of talent. She was no genius, but she wasn't as bad as Hiashi had made her out to be. Hinata's problem was _mental_. She hesitated too much, gave up easily and didn't believe in herself; her attempts to become stronger were corrupted by both fear of failing and the belief that she already was a failure—results of having her self-worth crippled by her clan and family.

Coaxing Hinata out of her shell was one of the hardest things Kurenai had ever done. It took a lot of patience and understanding, of praises and encouragement at the smallest of successes... but Kurenai saw that the little flower she had found wilting would definitely bloom one day. She had just needed a little love.

Kiba and Shino's inclusion to their dynamic had been a worry. Kiba was brash, explosive and intimidating, which made the Hinata fearful of upsetting him or even his dog, Akamaru. Shino was quiet like Hinata, but he was intelligent, unapproachable and blunt, making Hinata hesitant of proving herself stupid and a burden in his presence. Both boys constantly disagreed with each other because Kiba wanted to be the leader of his "pack" and Shino undermined him with constant criticism of his poorly-made decisions and uninformed comments, leaving Hinata as a nervous, silent observer to their conflicts until Kurenai stepped in.

The worry went away when Kurenai had the idea of grooming Hinata to be the team's peacemaker. In a way, the girl's first attempt had been disastrous. She had been a stuttering mess and not even Kiba's sensitive ears deciphered her mumblings… but it made the boys realize there _was_ a third person in Team 8, and that they were scaring her.

Kiba still had a desire to be the pack's alpha, but regarding Hinata, it began to manifest itself as a protective instinct. His outgoing personality ended up working in the team's favor when he noticed he could help the gloomy girl to keep her spirits up. Shino, on the other hand, kept Hinata grounded. His logical personality made it all but impossible for the girl to doubt or undersell herself with him nearby. Unlike Kiba, these two were loners and struggled to connect with others, but a team building exercise revealed that both enjoyed reading books, giving them enough common ground to begin their friendship.

It warmed Kurenai's heart to see how quickly Team 8 had bonded over the two weeks she had spent with them. Their bond was more than just interpersonal—it flowed into how they worked as ninja. They quickly understood the concepts of teamwork and Kurenai knew they would pass Kakashi's infamous bell test without problems.

As she walked through Konoha's busy streets, Kurenai's thoughts took her back to the meeting she and a select few jonin had with the Hokage roughly a week before. It was during that meeting that the Sandaime introduced his educational project, and it was because of this same project that things like her team taking Kakashi's bell test would actually be happening.

The Sandaime had been carefully reviewing the concepts that the academy was teaching as well as the performance of genin teams that had participated in previous Chunin Exams, regardless of promotions. To say that he wasn't impressed was an understatement.

The Hokage had come to realize that the academy was focusing far too much on the theoretical aspects of being a ninja and the cultural aspects, such as the history of the shinobi world. Because of that, the Academy didn't give the necessary attention to practical skills, leaving that job to the students themselves, their families (who many times weren't even ninja), and later on, the jonin-sensei.

The Academy only taught three E-rank jutsu: the Substitution, Transformation, and Clone jutsu. The physical training barely strayed from target practice with kunai/shuriken and basic taijutsu practice with spars.

Genjutsu was, much to Kurenai's disappointment, barely covered in practice. The teachers used basic E-rank genjutsu (such as changing someone's hair color) to teach the students how to dispel the illusions, but the actual execution was nowhere in the curriculum. They taught some theory about it, but that would only help those that chose genjutsu as their specialty.

And talking about specialties, the data from the Chunin Exams showed that ninja that came from clans were focusing only on their own niche, whereas those that didn't have a shinobi on their families struggled to find an area to focus on. This held true for many of those that were promoted as well as the majority that failed (not to mention those that died). Being predictable was one of the worst flaws a ninja could have, and the alarmingly high rates of death and grave injuries among recently promoted chunin were a testament to that fact.

It was clear that if things continued like that, Konoha's current generation of ninja would be crippled. As the Hokage, it was Hiruzen's job to find a solution to what could end up being a great problem for his future forces.

From there, the Professor, as some called the Sandaime, devised a project that sought to continue the education of genin and chunin. While the genin were still focused mostly on D and C-rank missions, they would undergo extra lessons on topics such as tactics and genjutsu in order to sharpen their skills and minds in preparation for the Chunin Exams and the B-rank missions that they would be then participating in.

In order to help those that managed to earn their flak jackets, chunin that didn't choose to pursue administrative or educational duties would also take extra classes on areas and subjects that they could specialize on, such as bukijutsu, fuuinjutsu, tracking, capturing, infiltration, poisons, medical ninjutsu and information gathering. Not only would this help to expand the skill set of his chunin, but it would allow them to better utilize the ninja they would be leading during missions. A Yamanaka, for example, might not be fully aware of how to use an Aburame under their command for tracking purposes.

His ultimate plan was to then integrate the extended genin curriculum into the academy, and then the extended chunin curriculum to the genin after a year or two. But… unfortunately, Konoha didn't have the funds to invest in such a huge project.

They would need to reform and expand the academy, hire new teachers that would able to teach these subjects to the students (which would also have another cost from both parties being unavailable for active duty at some points), invest in utensils for classes that required specific materials (like scrolls, brushes and ink for fuiinjutsu lessons, or the ridiculous amount of accessories needed to deal with poisons), update Konoha's library with materials the students would need... it was definitely costly.

That fact led the council of elders to reject Hiruzen's idea for the time being, but the old Hokage stubbornly insisted that his project was an immediate necessity and well worth the money and the cuts on the yearly budget. After much debate, the Sandaime decided to propose a smaller, cheaper version of the program to test if the results would truly justify the costs of the full project, and that was readily accepted.

They decided to experiment with only a select few genin teams, and instead of having classes taught in the academy, the lessons would be on training grounds or during missions.

For the "trial" version of the project, he chose the three genin teams that graduated from the academy that year, as well as one squad that had graduated in the previous year and still had to participate in a Chunin Exam. The choices weren't because Hiruzen had somehow used his crystal ball like a common fortune-teller to determine that those four squads would be involved in many important conflicts over the coming years and that every other squad Konoha had wouldn't be of note until a future war.

Of course not.

That would have been ridiculous.

Teams 7, 8 and 10, all of which graduated recently, were specialized squads. Team 7 was an assault squad, Team 8 a tracking team, and Team 10's specialty was in ambush/capture. The "veteran" Team Guy—Kurenai had no idea why they didn't use a number—was also chosen because, despite being another assault squad, the team was surprisingly balanced and able to perform well at any of the areas the newly-formed teams focused on.

The fact that all of the twelve genin involved with the project were either the children of clan heads, the top students of their class or the worst students of their class wasn't a mere coincidence. Another important factor behind Hiruzen's decision was related to the jonin in charge of the project and the teams in question. Kakashi, Kurenai, and Guy were the very best Konoha had to offer on the subjects of ninjutsu, genjutsu and taijutsu respectively.

Asuma Sarutobi, the jonin in charge of Team 10, might have seemed like the odd one of the four since he had no specialty of his own. However, a ninja with no niche is a ninja that can fit into a wider variety of teams and take a wider variety of missions. Asuma had a fair amount of experience with practically all facets of the profession, hence why Hiruzen chose him for the tactics class. He was the perfect shinobi to take the knowledge the genin have from the academy and transform it into something usable in real life.

Kurenai, who now was not very far from the Training Ground that her team was using, had been very excited about the project and the chance to _finally_ teach people about her craft. While she loved her squad, Shino and Kiba had no talent for genjutsu. Hinata, on the other hand, had some potential and interest in the art, but the girl refused to learn illusions because of her clan. They believed that a Hyuuga should only move on from the Gentle Fist once they master it, and going against the tradition was taboo.

To Kurenai's surprise, Hiruzen had convinced Hiashi to make an exception for the sake of his project. Perhaps Hiruzen had called in a favor… but it didn't matter to her. She now had more than a few genin capable of learning from her, and she was definitively looking forward to her time with Team 7, however grim the circumstances around that arrangement.

But that would only be on the following day. She still had much to do before that.

Finally, Kurenai arrived at the gates of Training Ground 5, where she had left her team. Even after all that time walking, she still felt the need to close her eyes and take a deep breath to center herself.

If the Sandaime was correct, the eight-man team's chances of survival would be much higher if Team 8's tracking abilities were working as they should, and thus, she would push them hard for the rest of the day.

With determination blazing within her red eyes and her confidence restored, Kurenai continued moving forward. She had to do everything in her power to ensure these kids would survive the coming weeks. That, was her top priority.

None of them would die on that mission. Not on her watch.

* * *

A/N:

And... we're done! I know this chapter was mostly exposition and once again, I apologize for that; I tried to make it as interesting as I could. The Sandaime's project and the geopolitical background of the mission needed to be explained for the "Team 8 also goes to Wave!" part to make sense.

I'd like to remind everyone that, for all intents and purposes, this is an AU. There will be things that will change and things that have already changed so don't expect everything to match canon despite me not straying very far from it for the bigger plot.

For example, the Wave mission originally happened only a week after graduation. With an extra week between these events, Team 8's stronger bond is more believable, and Team 7 are now a little more tolerant of each other. Kurenai taking Hinata under her wing earlier was done for a similar reason.

Another important change that surely most of you noticed is that Hiruzen's power as the Hokage is slightly more limited... and that he didn't get rid of Danzo (though he did order him to disband ROOT, which Danzo didn't. Obviously). While this might not come up in my story, the reason behind this is that Hiruzen had no solid evidence to back up his claims about Danzo's involvement with the Uchiha Massacre, so he was unable to get rid of the old war hawk. Also, I found it rather weird that they didn't have someone to become part of the council after Danzo left... but that's about it.

Ah, one thing I think that deserves to be said here (and it's on my profile too) is that fanfics are community projects. If you spot any errors, inconsistencies and such, please send me a PM about it. I don't care how small the error is, or even if it's just a letter that wasn't capitalized on the A/N... please do warn me. You will be credited with any errors you find on the revised version of the chapter (check my profile every now and then to see if any chapters were changed), and I will personally thank you via a PM and maybe give you a shout-out in an A/N too.

But enough of me explaining my explanations... hopefully you enjoyed this chapter, though! I'd like to remind you all that my profile has quite a lot of information about this fic. If you haven't already seen it already, please do it soon! Otherwise, feel free to read the next chapter.

* * *

Changelog:

v1.0.1 (10/25/15) - Added Horizontal lines to separate blocks of text. I used a few hyphens to do it before, but this site gets rid of them for some reason. Also fixed a few typos.

v2.0 (11/07/15) - Enhanced pretty much the whole chapter, both in terms of content and grammar. Heck, the chapter went from 6200 words to basically 9000 words, and some stuff got deleted too.

The most important changes are that Sarutobi's project was explained better (thank reviewer _**Serious Sam**_ for prompting me to expand that part) and that Hinata's character was explored more deeply. But the briefing of the first half also got additional content.

v2.0.1 (11/08/15) - Fixed some small mistakes that I didn't catch on the 2.0 revision

v2.1 (12/21/15) - Reworded some stuff, and added a small part talking about the Kyuubi Festival/Naruto's birthday.

v2.5 (04/07/16) - Fixed some mistakes regarding improper use of Present Tense, as per _JLBShecky's_ detailed suggestions in a review (though some parts were kept in that tense as I felt Past Tense implicated those things no longer would apply in the present or future). Additionally, after reading _**DryBonesKing's**_ review (author of the incredible fic **True Potential** ), I decided to add a little clarification to the "depose the Mizukage" comment. Other minor errors I caught by myself were also fixed.

v2.6 (10/30/16) - Addressed the possibility of Mei's death during the war, as per _Fury074's_ suggestions.

v2.6.1 (01/30/16) - Fixed a single typo. Kudos to _**RoseWarden,**_ author of the amazing Fire Emblem Awakening self-insert fic named **Cycle**. I am against recommending anything but Naruhina fics on this story/under this profile, but **Cycle** is one of the major inspirations for my story here, as it proved to me that slower-paced story with a focus on characters can work wonderfully.

If you liked my story, I'm sure you will fall in love with it as long as you know about Fire Emblem Awakening. It makes my fic looks like the product of a toddler hitting random keys on the keyboard and somehow managing to post the "story" anyways.

Entertainment aside, it's a very good fic to read and analyze for aspiring writers, particularly those that want to try improving at using the first-person perspective or at writing deep characters and relationships. Her Lucina in particular is mind-blowing, and the bond F!Robin has with Lucina and Chrom is just amazing to read.

v3.0 (20/08/17) – Multiple things changed and the chapter was polished across the board.

For the first part: The intro about Hiruzen is less heavy, Kurenai is introduced a little before Kakashi enters the room, the council bit was expanded so it doesn't feel like Homura and Koharu are Danzo's puppets. The Kyuubi festival bit from v2.1 was removed due to irrelevant.

For the second: 99% of the exposition about Hinata comes before the project, much of said exposition has changed so that it will be shown in her character later instead of told to your face now, her backstory regarding Kurenai/Team 8 was explained, minor details about the educational project were changed/expanded.

v3.0.1 (24/08/17) – I decided to cut the little bit about Team Guy's name since I thought it could be better used in Chapter 21. Instead, Kurenai simply doesn't know how that came to be. Also fixed a little thing about the councilmen.

v3.0.2 (28/08/17) – Fixed some stray typos and missing line breaks.

v3.0.3 (16/09/17) - More small fixes, most of them because of the feedback I got from _gio08_ , who recently became the fic's second beta reader.

v3.0.4 (02/02/17) - Fixed one typo, thanks guest reviewer _Stickler._ Alsoexpanded on more details about the council of elders and their objectives after discussing things with _Bearmauls_ _._


	2. Chapter 2 - Dreams and Illusions

Hey there! For today we'll spend some time with Hinata to formally introduce her, her life, past, and some of her dynamics with her clan. This chapter also covers the first of the three parts of Team 7's training with Kurenai.

It will be a while until these training scenes are done and the teams meet up (It will be at the end of chapter 5), so hang in there! These scenes are actually very important in the long run, as Chapter 5 will show.

Key warnings for this chapter: Bullying. Extremely minor OC halfway through. Somewhat in-depth talk about the basics of genjutsu.

I hope that you will enjoy this chapter!

* * *

 _Prologue Arc_

Chapter 2: Dreams and Illusions (v3.0)

* * *

It was snowing on that fateful day...

On a small road within the woods surrounding Konoha's ninja academy, a young girl could be found crouched near the ground, staring curiously at a small amount of snow that she held in her bare hands.

The girl had short, straight blue hair with twin bangs framing her fair-skinned face, and she was protected from the falling snow by a dull purple coat, blue pants, and a cream-colored scarf. Her pale, pupil-less lavender eyes stared at the fluffy white snow in childish wonder.

"So this is how snow feels like!" she giggled, unbothered by the cold sensation. Like all young children, new discoveries excited her.

The girl had been curious about how snow felt like for a while now. It was not like she hadn't seen snow in her life before, but her parents were very protective of her and never allowed her to go outside when it was snowing, so she could only watch from the closed windows of her bedroom as the white powder accumulated on the courtyard.

Finally experiencing the snow like she had wanted for so long brought a smile to her face, but not even five seconds later… it vanished.

She allowed the snow to slip between her fingers until it was back on the ground.

This newfound freedom… wasn't worth it.

Her mother wasn't there anymore, and her father stopped caring about where she went or what she was doing. It was almost as if he didn't want her to exist anymore, and somehow, that hurt her so much more than her mother's death.

She had overheard a few branch house Hyuuga saying that her mother's illness "took away more than just his wife". She wasn't sure she understood what they meant, but she supposed it was why he changed so much.

He no longer smiled or asked about her day. He sent instructors to train her in his place. He stopped passing by her room before bed to give her a goodnight kiss. He almost never leaves his office, not even for dinner. The one time she had managed to catch him outside the office she tried to hug him…

She missed him so much, but apparently, he didn't. He had only scolded her for showing weakness in public and pushed her away. To cry was to show weakness too, so she didn't dare to do it in front of him, and ended up fleeing to her room.

Thinking about that rejection still hurt—a lot—but her tears had long since dried, replaced by a frown. The only times she knew he was alone was when he was working! She had thought that maybe he was trying to say that it was okay for her to visit him in his office. Oh, how wrong she had been…

"I'm far too busy to waste my time with you. Leave."

He had been so frigid that the snow by her feet would be jealous. He hadn't even spared her a glance.

Surely, she _must_ have done something wrong. The only other explanation was that he didn't love her anymore, but that was…

She scowled.

No, that couldn't be right. Even if she didn't know when, where or how, surely she messed up somewhere. That must have been it.

 _'…Maybe this is because I didn't awaken the Byakugan fast enough,'_ she thought. Her father had also berated her because of that, even though her grandfather had commented during breakfast that six was a fairly young age for the awakening.

Was that still not enough…?

Perhaps that why he hadn't given her any presents that day? It was the day of the Rinne Festival, of all things! The entire point of the holiday—from her perspective—was to give presents. Sure, her seventh birthday was only two days away, on December 27th, so _maybe_ that year he was planning to give her only a single present instead of one for each occasion but… somehow, she felt that she shouldn't expect any presents.

 _"At least,"_ her eyes widened at the memory of her father's words, _"we can finally begin to train you in actual Gentle Fist."_

Could that be the key? She had been training only the basic katas of her family's taijutsu, and she knew she wasn't amazing at those. Her father had never complained when they still trained together, but she knew from his face and from how hard he kept pushing her that he wanted more, and now that she had the Byakugan... maybe she could finally improve and meet his expectations!

"Okay," she got up, eyes shining with determination. If she was to please her father, she needed to make sure that she wouldn't mess up how to activate the Byakugan during training. He had gotten another person to teach her the sign sequence for a forced activation, so a part of her doubted he would be overseeing her Gentle Fist training… but even so, she couldn't fail him again!

First, she went through the seals slowly, focusing only getting the order and shapes correctly since she still struggled a bit with both. The second time, now smiling confidently, she sped up and added chakra to the mix.

Her sight exploded. The veins around her eyes enlarged as blood and chakra rush through them, and the young girl watched with awe as the world of white snow around her transformed into a landscape of dull darkness.

The pitch-black snow held her attention for a while, but then she heard voices in the distance. Her eyes allowed her to see all around her, up to ten meters, but there was nobody in range.

"Hey, look! A girl!"

That was a boy's voice. If she wasn't mistaken, it was coming from somewhere behind her.

"Do you think she would want to play with us?" another boy spoke up.

"I dunno," a third boy said. "Let's ask her!"

The girl couldn't help her smile as excitement coursed through her. It had been so long since she had last played with anyone! As soon as they entered her expanded field of vision, she turned around to introducing herself.

A mistake.

"Ugh... look at those creepy eyes!" one of them exclaimed, his face scrunched up in disgust.

"It's one of those nasty Hyuuga!" another boy said, pointing at her.

Yelping, she instinctively took a couple steps back. In hopes of salvaging the situation, she scrambled to deactivate her dojutsu… but it only made everything worse.

"What, aren't we good enough to see your stupid Byakugan!?" the third boy spat venomously.

"Ha! She thinks she's something special just like the rest of her clan!" the boy who had been pointing at her scoffed. "But you are all just stuck-up, ugly-eyed dumbasses!"

Tears started to form in the girl's eyes, but remembering her father's words about crying, she held them back as best as she could.

The boy who had pointed at her began to laugh. "I was gonna ask your name, but I guess you don't need one! We'll just call you "The Byakugan Monster" from now on, you hear!?"

Her fragile walls crumbled as the other boys joined in the fun, laughing at her while chanting the nickname.

"P-Please, stop!" she begged, unable to control her tears. They began to laugh harder, and one of them shoved her to the snow.

"Monster! Monster!" they chorused in a musical tone, "Byakugan Monster!"

She didn't even think about getting up, instead curling into fetal position and covering her teary eyes, taking what little protection the darkness offered.

If only she were stronger…!

"Hey!"

A fourth voice cut through all the laughter and somehow, her despair intensified.

 _'Another boy!?'_

"Cut it out, you _cowards!_ "

Her mind went blank for a second—she was mistaken! She scrambled to get up, to see who was seemingly coming to her rescue.

It was someone that she would never forget.

A young boy, probably just as old as herself, was running towards the bullies from behind them. His yell made the trio turn their backs on her to face him instead.

The newcomer had spiky blond hair, blue eyes and cute little whisker-like marks on both sides of his puffed-up cheeks. The mysterious boy looked just as angry as his tone had implied, but the silly pair of green goggles on his head didn't make him look very threatening. He was wearing an open orange jacket, revealing a black shirt with a white spiral design on its center. His shorts were of a similar blue tone blue to the girl's pants, and he also wore a scarf—though his was of a beautiful crimson that put her own to shame, with the tail end flowing behind him, almost like a cape.

The bullies turned. "Who do you think you are to order us around!?" one of them screamed, pointing at the blond just like he had done to the girl beforehand. An epiphany told the girl he was most likely the group's leader.

"I'm Naruto Uzumaki, and I'm gonna be Hokage someday!" the blond boy boldly introduced himself, clearly hoping his future title would carry some weight.

Predictably, the trio only laughed at him for that declaration and began to mock him, calling him names much like they had done to the girl less than a minute ago.

However... unlike her, the boy didn't break down in tears. No, to the girl's awe, Naruto had enough courage to stand up to them.

"You don't believe me, huh?" he growled, in a tone that implied he had already predicted that he wouldn't be taken seriously. "Alright! Then I'll show you!"

Scowling, he brought up his hands together, pointer and middle fingers outstretched in a cross-like position: the hand seal used for the Clone Jutsu and all of its variants.

"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

Sadly for Naruto, while the jutsu did work, it was far from ideal. After two poofs, a pair of clones appeared in front of the boy... but they were extremely small and deformed, not even a foot tall. In another situation, the little girl might have squealed from how cute the two mini-Narutos were, but that wasn't the case today. She had a good idea of what was going to happen next and it was not going to be cute.

Despite their size and appearance, both clones squeaked out a defiant "I'll kick your ass!" to the bullies, who in turn only stared at the failed copies in disbelief. The original, on the other hand, didn't look anywhere as confident as his miniatures. Much like the girl, he had already realized where this was going.

The three bullies proceeded to kick the clones away and beat up the defenseless Naruto. The boy tried to fight back, but it was in vain. Three against one were hardly fair odds, and he was a bit smaller than them, too.

The girl wanted to rush towards him to help—everything had been her fault—but fear of provoking the wrath of their tormentors left her paralyzed. All she could do was watch.

Naruto eventually went unconscious, and the bullies soon lost interest. The girl's silence made the bullies completely forget she existed, so they turned their attention to the next best thing: Naruto's crimson scarf.

They played many games with the scarf, from tug-of-war to using it to swing from trees, but they were so rough with it that the threads started to come undone. Once it no longer served any purpose, adding insult to injury, one of the boys threw the scarf on the snow and the three stomped all over it.

"There. Now it's trashed just like you, loser!" the leader of the trio said before they left the area, still laughing.

"Ha! That'll teach him!"

"Like hell someone like him will be Hokage one day!"

"…"

The girl never felt more disgust in her life. The only thing she didn't know was which was stronger: her disgust for the bullies, or for herself.

As soon as the boys were gone, the girl regained control of her legs. She hurried towards her fallen hero, but… she couldn't ignore the tattered scarf that stood between them.

It hurt to look at it. "You were so beautiful…"

Gently, she picked it up and folded it, and then approached Naruto. Crouching near him, she noticed his busted lips, his bleeding nose, his face all swollen and bruised…

And then the boy jumped to his feet.

"I'm not done with you!" he declared loudly, making the girl's heartbeat skyrocket from the scare. "This time my jutsu will work for sure and... uh...? What?"

The boy quickly trailed off as he looked around and realized that the trio no longer was in the woods. Sighing in defeat, he crouched to examine the torn remains of the scarf that the girl now held, looking at it unhappily.

The little happiness the girl still felt because he came to her rescue disappeared. "Are... are you alright?"

Naruto rose and wiped the blood from his face using his sleeve. When he faced her, it was with a wide, brilliant smile. "Yep! I'm fine. I'm used to this kind of thing, so it's no big deal."

She eyed him skeptically—something about his smile was _wrong_ —but decided not to press him. "Um... here!" she offered the scarf back to him instead. "It will warm you up. Y-You must be cold…"

Much to her surprise, instead of being happy that the bullies at least hadn't stolen the scarf, he waved her off dismissively. His smile disappeared, leaving only that same sad expression from before in its place.

Clearly, it was more than just a scarf for him. The realization came with a horrible wave of guilt.

It was all her fault.

"I'm sorry..." she apologized, head hung low. Saying it only made her feel worse.

"Nah," Naruto got up, shaking his head. "It's okay."

To her shock, immediately after saying that he turned his back on her and ran down the road, as if nothing had happened.

"Wait!"

Naruto stopped and faced her, confusion written all over his face.

"Um... I... th-thank you very much!" she said, bowing to him.

She heard a soft gasp and once she straightened, she saw him slack-jawed, eyes wide and with disbelief all over his face. It was almost as if he had never expected her to show gratitude or respect despite his heroics…

And then he offered her the brightest smile she had ever seen in someone's face, almost as if saying "thank you" himself.

It left her with a warm feeling in her heart as he once again took off. He was laughed at, insulted, beaten up, he lost his scarf... and he still had the strength to keep going, smiling.

It was inspiring.

 _'Can I become as strong as him one day?'_

Her gaze then fell to the bundle of red threads in her arms, and she clutched it tightly to her chest. As unusable as it was, it made for a precious Rinne Festival present.

A symbol of hope. A symbol of courage.

 _'You lost this red scarf because of me,'_ she thought, smiling, _'but one day... one day I'll knit another scarf just like this one and give it to you… Naruto-kun.'_

A symbol of their newfound connection.

That promise remained on her mind even as everything around her—Naruto, the trees, the snow—began to waver.

Slowly but surely, the world blurred until it was no more…

* * *

...And to a sequence of increasingly louder beeps of an old alarm clock, Hinata Hyuuga awakened from her slumber.

"Ugh…"

Groggily, her narrowed eyes darted around confusedly in the darkness of her room. When her brain finally began to work properly again, she sluggishly threw her covers off and crawled to the dresser by the foot of her bed.

"5 a.m," she read aloud in a raspy voice, silencing the alarm clock that demanded her attention while rubbing her lavender eyes.

Hinata was now twice as old as her dream self, and traded the winter clothes that kept her warm in the snow for a light, pink kimono she wore as a pajama. Her hair was still short but had gained some extra volume, which her messy bedhead greatly exaggerated.

Now in silence once again, she yawned, stretched… and fell back on the mattress, smiling fondly. Her mind had already erased a fair amount of the dream she just had, but some of it still stuck… after all, her dream had a real-life counterpart.

That day was one of her most precious memories, despite how it all began. However, not all that she had dreamed matched reality. Some of what the bullies did in her dream would've been too much for a simple scarf to endure without ripping completely, and she was sure Naruto had no idea that the Shadow Clone Jutsu even existed at the time—she has a vague recollection of him shoving one of the bullies before they ganged up on him.

Hinata was sure that if Naruto knew about that jutsu, he would've relentlessly pestered their sensei Iruka about teaching it to him, only for Iruka to say no and leave Naruto pouting for the rest of the class. She could easily imagine the scene, and it made her giggle a bit.

Kiba had done the exact same thing the day before, after learning from Kurenai the reason behind Naruto's field promotion to genin. He spent the rest of the day a bit snappy with everyone, which predictably led to a couple conflicts with Shino that she had to diffuse.

"I hope they'll behave today," she sighed. Kurenai was already used to their dynamic, but who knew how Naruto's sensei would react to their bickering?

With another lazy stretch, Hinata jumped out of bed, slipped on her slippers and headed to her bathroom to clean up. She was supposed to be on Training Ground 3 in two hours, but she still had important things to do beforehand and no time to lose.

Normally, she would still wake up around that time, if only to enjoy the peaceful early mornings by herself. The only other people in the Hyuuga Manor that were active at that time were some of the branch house servants; starting her day so early allowed her to have breakfast in peace, away from the loud gatherings of the main house that happened every single morning.

Hinata had always felt a degree of anxiousness in noisy places full of people, but say, traversing a busy street? It was unsettling, especially if she was alone, but she could handle it. Breakfast with her clan, however… not as much.

They stared. They _whispered_. She could see the disdain and even pity in some of her clansmen when they looked at her. She could feel the unspoken comparisons to her younger sister, who took to the Gentle Fist like fish to water.

It got to the point where she constantly had to fight the urge to faint.

She still couldn't believe it had been easier for her to muster the courage to strike a deal with her father instead of enduring it. It came with a promise, however: that she'd stop being an embarrassment to him and the clan as a whole. That she'd use that time to train herself. That she'd strive to make him proud and prove she could become worthy of his time.

A few years before, she had religiously used that extra time for its intended purpose… and yet, she had barely shown anything for it. Her father never bothered to check on her to see if she was really training, so, discouraged by her lack of progress and by how little all of it mattered, Hinata eventually began to use some of that time to invest on her hobbies instead.

After all, not only did she hate that she was training so to hurt— to kill—people, she knew would never get better… so why bother if she would inevitably fail? She was forced to train during part of her day regardless of what she did in the mornings anyways.

At least, it was easier to endure it all if she could brighten her day a little, be it by taking care of her late mother's garden, by investing on her hobby of pressing flowers or even by experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen. She had been using more and more of her free morning time for those kinds of activities as the years went on…

Almost thirty minutes after she woke up, Hinata emerged from her bathroom, clean and with her blue hair neatly combed. Making a beeline for her wardrobe, she collected some of her clothes for the day: a simple black T-shirt and blue pants. From the drawers inside the wardrobe she chose her underwear, frowning a bit when she picked up a bra—she hated having to use those cumbersome things.

After dressing herself, Hinata traded her slippers for sandals and left her room.

She spent a couple minutes walking through a series of empty identical-looking hallways, deliberately designed to make navigation as hard as possible for intruders, who (ideally) lacked a Byakugan. Of course, since she lived there, Hinata didn't need her dojutsu to find her destination: the manor's kitchen.

There were many branch house Hyuuga inside. Cooks and servants, who worked hard to prepare the massive meals the main house consumed for breakfast.

The head cook noticed her entering. "Ah, Hinata-sama! Good morning!" he greeted her with a smile, and the other people in the room quickly followed suit.

"Good morning everyone," Hinata replied, her quiet tone contrasting with her own bright smile as she took in the familiar faces.

"Going to prepare lunch for your team again, Hinata-sama?" one of the maids asked, a girl slightly older than Hinata whose name was Keiko.

"Yes, but not just them," Hinata said as she walked towards the refrigerators, her head held high. "Another team will eat with us today, so there's a lot of food this time."

Not to mention she planned to pack bigger helpings for herself and her teammates, since they were instructed to skip breakfast.

"Hmm," Keiko pursed her lips. "Don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it, okay?"

"It's been a while since Hinata-sama has truly needed our help," the head cook commented, laughing. "I'm sure she can handle it. Or did you forget she made Hanabi-sama's birthday cake all by herself? That wasn't even two weeks ago!"

Hinata blushed, smiling from ear to ear not only at the memory of her accomplishment, but at the expression of pure joy that her little sister wore as she ate slice after slice of the three-layered cake.

The guests too had found the cake's taste and decoration to be marvelous, but Hinata cared little for their opinion… though she did wonder how they'd react if they knew who made it.

 _'Alright... let's see what we can do today.'_ She opened the refrigerator. _'I need rice, some vegetables, fish… wait. Oh, so we still have some pork.'_

Luckily for Hinata, the cooks told her they weren't planning on using the pork, so she chose it to be the lunch's protein instead of fish. Kiba had commented before that he preferred "real meat" instead of fish, but that wasn't the only factor she had in mind.

From her… _research_ , Hinata also knew that a certain someone really, really loved extra pork with his miso ramen. It truly wasn't much, but seeing as she knew she didn't have the guts to approach him directly, it would have to do.

 _'My debt to Naruto-kun won't pay itself after all.'_

Though, she couldn't deny a part of her just wanted to impress him with her cooking skills… and maybe…

 _'Stop! Focus, Hinata,'_ she shook her head, hoping to dispel her distracting, futile thoughts.

Hinata brought some ingredients to a corner of the room that the staff had arranged for her. She had a fair amount of space as well as pots, utensils, sink, and even a stove for her personal use, all thanks to her father cutting some personnel a few years prior and unknowingly freeing up the space and tools.

She had thought they had done it just to get her out of their way, but to her surprise, it had been a simple show of gratitude. An earnest "thank you" for treating them with kindness and respect even though she could've trampled all over them to get whatever she wanted.

 _'It's a pity that most of the main house think of them as little more than slaves,'_ she thought with a frown as she began to organize her workspace. _'The cursed seal truly is an abomination… but I shouldn't think about this right now.'_

Hinata took a deep breath to clear her mind. Nothing good would come of cooking with such heavy thoughts on her mind.

Instead, she focused on how her teammates had reacted to her food. Every single time she had brought lunch to them throughout the past two weeks, they had showered her with compliments.

A fire burned in her eyes. Hinata refused to let that day be any different.

 _'Okay! Time to work!'_

* * *

"And… there! All done," Hinata whispered to herself, wiping the sweat off her brow. ' _It's nothing fancy, but I'm sure they'll love it.'_

If there was one thing about herself that Hinata had full confidence in, it was in her ability to cook. She felt in comfortable and in control when cooking: she knew exactly what she was supposed to do, and exactly how to do it. Good results were nothing but a consequence of those two facts.

It had taken her quite a while to start believing in what other people told her after tasting her food… but now, Hinata could look at her handiwork with pride: eight bentos brimming with food—delicious food, she knew—as well as fresh tea and orange juice in two separate thermoses.

Satisfied, she walked back to the refrigerator and took out a little pot of leftovers for Akamaru, as well as a bottle of water and two ice packs to keep all the food at ambient temperature, placing all of those next to the bentos.

All that was left was to pack them, and Hinata had left her old academy backpack in one of "her" cabinets the day before specifically for that. But when she bent down to open it…

A monstrous sound echoed through the kitchen. The room had been bustling with noise, but the roar was loud enough that everyone noticed it. And they all knew who was at fault.

Keiko, who had been near Hinata by coincidence, couldn't resist and burst out laughing. "Looks like _someone_ skipped breakfast, right Hinata-sama?"

"Don't tease the poor thing, Keiko-chan!" the head cook scolded, with a traitorous hint of humor in his tone. "You know how she gets."

Hinata found the backpack but refused to get up, face reddening. A few other workers were also snickering, to make things worse.

Was it too late to crawl inside the cabinet…?

"But it's so funny!" Keiko argued. "She's such a shy, quiet little thing, but her stomach _clearly_ had enough of being like that!"

Hinata mumbled something about the height difference between them being negligible, but even as close as she was, Keiko had no hope of deciphering it.

"Sorry, though," the maid apologized instead. Keiko did not bow to the girl, knowing that Hinata didn't like that kind of treatment.

"I-It's fine," Hinata rose and began to pack her things, blushing terribly. "M-My team… our sensei said to skip breakfast for today's training. I don't understand why, though…"

The maid winced. "Ouch… cooking's already unpleasant enough by itself, but doing it while hungry? That must've been torture!"

Hinata faced her with the smallest of smirks. "Cooking is never unpleasant."

"You listen to her, Keiko-chan," the head cook butted in, just as Hinata had predicted. "She knows what's what."

Giggling a bit at the playful argument that ensued while she finished packing—Keiko hated to cook—Hinata said her goodbyes to everyone and left the kitchen, retracing her route from earlier in the morning.

Hinata left her backpack on the bed and glanced at her clock. It was 6:30 a.m; she still had quite a few minutes to spare before risking arriving late.

It was time to equip herself for the day.

She took a roll of bandages from her dresser and wrapped it around her right thigh before tying up her weapon holster over them. This was to allow the holster to be strapped securely without hurting her or cutting off the leg's circulation.

As a Gentle Fist-user, Hinata only kept shuriken on the holster since kunai were often superfluous. Still, kunai had their uses, so she kept some in her hip pouch, together with other items like rope and a small container of ointment. After checking if all of her tools were there, she attached the pouch to the back of her pants.

Next, she took her headband. As much as she disagreed with all the practices revolving around the cursed seal, she didn't dare to use it to cover her forehead, despite it actually being the smarter thing to do. After all, if an enemy killed her, they would mistake her for a branch member and wouldn't take her eyes. Some main branch Hyuuga did wear it like that, but considering her position as the clan's heiress and her shaky social standing…

"I'd probably be banished or something," she muttered with bitter humor, tying the headband around her neck instead. That wasn't too bad either—the neck was easily the most vulnerable part of the body.

Lastly, she opened her wardrobe again, this time focusing on a pile of identical cream jackets with the Hyuuga Clan's red emblem sewn on the shoulders, inside yellow circles. Her father had ordered various copies for her to wear during missions, as they had chainmail woven on the inside, but the kitchen's heat made wearing them while cooking suicidal.

Still, Hinata loved them. She felt cold easily, they had hoods, and were also quite comfortable. More importantly, their thickness added some bulk to her frame, flattening her silhouette and hiding her chest. After her last growth spurt a few months prior and before she got in the habit of wearing the jackets, not only her female classmates kept shooting her dirty looks—as if it was her fault her body was like that—but she had actually caught grown men ogling her chest, one of them being an academy teacher.

It had been… _violating_.

Shuddering at the memory, she zipped up the jacket. Looking a bit plump was worth it.

Ready to leave, Hinata went to close her wardrobe's door when her eyes caught a glimpse of something special, hidden behind some folded sheets in a dark corner. Most people would perceive it just as an old shoebox.

To Hinata, it was her treasure chest.

She took the box and opened it. Inside was an old, damaged crimson scarf, which she began to stroke it gently, looking at the cloth with fondness. "It's been a while, hasn't it…?"

Her younger self used to take out the scarf often, hoping to draw courage from the memories it brought. However, her attempts at becoming stronger grew half-hearted as the years passed. Knowing she had betrayed everything her— _his_ —scarf represented, Hinata had become too ashamed to look at it again. Unworthy.

There was even a time she had considered burning the scarf. When her last year at the academy began, her father had finally decided to stop paying instructors and take charge of her training himself. The months she spent with him had all but convinced her that it was completely futile to keep trying to meet his expectations... to keep trying to earn his love.

Things had become easier once she began to train with Kurenai, but it wasn't until the day she had been assigned to Team 8 that Hinata began to feel courage again. It was when the scarf's previous owner showed her once again that one should never give up, no matter what the world tells you. Naruto had reignited a fire inside her heart, and she found herself training harder than ever before as her career as a genin began, knowing that if he had succeeded, then she had no excuse.

She had to try her best, and that was exactly what she planned to do.

After putting her treasure and its chest back where they belonged, Hinata made her bed and opened her curtains and window, allowing fresh air and sunlight to enter the room.

The sun was bright, the sky was cloudless, and the birds were singing happily. Her heart sang with them—she could feel that it was going to be an amazing day.

Leaving her room behind, Hinata again braved her home's maze of corridors but took a different path this time. Some main house members were already arriving for the breakfast ceremony that happened at 7 a.m, so Hinata tended to leave the through the dojo instead. It connected to the outdoor training grounds at the back of the manor, and simply walking around the outer walls of the building would lead her down a side entrance that nobody but the guards paid attention to.

She went inside the dojo and kept walking towards the courtyard door, which was open. Nobody used the room until after the breakfast ceremony… but Hinata realized that the door should have been closed too late.

"Hinata. I was waiting for you."

The only thing that kept her from screaming was that she recognized the voice—a man's voice. It made her body froze automatically, and it was with great effort that the girl managed to force her head sideways, slowly, to confirm what she dreaded.

The man had white, seemingly pupil-less eyes similar to her own lavender ones, and his long brown hair that flowed freely down his back. He was dressed in a loose white robe under a brown haori.

It was her father, Hiashi Hyuuga.

His expression was stoic and controlled, betraying nothing… or rather, one detail slipped by: the dark, veiny skin around his eyes that suggested a restless night.

Driven by a surge of fear, Hinata whirled around to face him, bowing low to show him respect and to dodge his gaze, if only for the moment.

"G-G-Good mo-morning, otou-sama. W-Why… um…"

Her voice—meek and at a higher pitch than normal—died in her throat together with that dangerous question.

"I am here to discuss a matter that was brought up during last evening's monthly council meeting."

Hinata didn't even expect it anymore, but the lack of the small, simple gestures like a "good morning" still hurt, even after all those years.

…Straightening, she mused that greeting someone you hate must take too much effort.

"As you know," Hiashi continued, "there are doubts regarding your position as my heiress, thanks to your poor performance and your sister's talent. The spars you two had with each other over the past couple years prove as much."

Hinata lowered her head, face burning with shame. While she had never given her all in those fights to preserve Hanabi's future, her little sister was skilled enough to give her a run for her money even if she were to fight at her fullest. Her chances were 50%, at best…

"After yesterday's meeting, it was agreed that our clan's future cannot remain in this dubious state of affairs. You and your sister will duel once again. If you lose, your title of heiress will be forfeit and your responsibilities toward the clan will change accordingly with your position in the line of succession."

Hinata's head slowly moved upwards. Her father remained as expressive as a wall.

"However, you've recently become a genin and thus have to prioritize your duties to Konoha. I need to know your schedule before I can decide when the duel will happen."

"…Understood."

There was no stuttering, no hesitance and no fear in Hinata as she informed about her training and upcoming mission. It was completely numb and mechanical, and though she looked at his face as she spoke, Hiashi noticed that her gaze was unfocused.

"…I see," He crossed his arms. "Then I will wait for your return to settle this. You should take this evening to rest and prepare for your mission tomorrow… Hinata," he narrowed his eyes, "are you listening to me?"

Hinata snapped to attention. "Y-Y-Yes!" she blurted out, stiffening.

He continued observing her. "… Tell me, you said that you'd be training under another team's sensei this morning."

Hinata nodded. She began to feel an uncomfortable tightness in the pit of her stomach.

"I remember that the documents I had to sign regarding the Hokage's project mentioned three teachers besides your team's. I'm curious: which one will be teaching you today?"

"Ka… K-Kakashi," she somehow managed, distracted by her trembling legs.

"Ah… him."

On the back of her mind, Hinata realized that was the first time her father's usually stoic tone showed any hints of annoyance during their conversation. Those and his scowl were constantly present whenever they interacted—particularly during the months she trained with him in that very room—but oddly enough, they had been absent until that moment.

…She was so focused on trying to get air into her lungs as subtly as possible that the thought failed to stick.

"You should go, then," he said. "That man has no respect for anyone's time, but that doesn't mean you can show up late. I too must leave to begin the breakfast ceremony."

Following the unspoken prompt, Hinata bowed with great difficulty and her father left the room without saying another word.

The door slid shut and Hinata felt everything whirl. The dojo's walls began closing in on her and Hinata tried to flee through the other door, but she only managed a couple shaky steps into the courtyard before her legs betrayed her.

The sun was still shining outside, but its warmth was nothing compared to the cold sweat marring her pale skin. The sky was still cloudless, but Hinata's vision had wavered so badly that she couldn't even recognize anything. The birds were still singing, but Hinata couldn't hear them over her gasps for breath—unlike her legs, her lungs were working on overdrive.

Somehow, even as a deep fear overwhelmed her, the only thought her mind conjured at the time was that she'd probably end up late.

* * *

Naruto Uzumaki was already late.

 _'Crap… I can't believe I forgot that today we would NOT be dealing with Kakashi-sensei!'_ he thought, shoving a hastily made sandwich down his throat as he jumped from roof to roof towards Training Ground 5.

Thanks to Kakashi's chronic lateness, he was used to waking up at 8:30 a.m. When his alarm clock woke him up two hours earlier than normal he simply turned it off, cursing the poor thing for malfunctioning. Luckily, a flood of memories jolted him awake before he could oversleep for more than fifteen minutes

To make things worse, in his hurry to get ready for the day, Naruto ended up tripping on something while making a bowl of cereal—likely a pair of dirty underwear, but he wasn't sure—and dropped the bowl, dirtying his clothes and the floor with spilled milk.

That forced him to double back and change his orange tracksuit and pants to another pair identical to the one he had (that is, ignoring the milk stains), and he lost some time mopping up his floor, too. Spoiled milk smelled bad enough when it was just on his refrigerator.

That tragic incident also got rid of the last box of cereal that he had, so a simple sandwich had to do. _'Meh. Not my favorite, but at least it's something,'_ he thought, smirking wildly before taking another bite _. 'I'm sure that the suckers Kakashi-sensei will be working with are going to take that stupid bell test, so they haven't had breakfast yet AND will be stuck for hours waiting for that lazy cyclops.'_

With his mouth full of bread, he barely contained his mischievous laughter at the expense of the innocently ignorant members of Team 8, whoever they might be. Eating was simply the higher priority, so he settled for enjoying a tasty breakfast in their stead.

But fate had other plans for that sandwich.

Not even ten seconds after he thought that, Naruto tripped on a particularly slippery rooftop and fell, dropping his half-eaten bread in the process.

"No…!" he whined pathetically, reaching out to his bread as it slid down to the streets—likely on the head of some poor civilian that happened to be at the wrong place and the wrong time.

"Dammit," he banged his fist on the roof before getting up and fleeing the scene. He had no doubt that if someone saw him, they would get the wrong idea and think he did it on purpose as just another prank. However, from the loud barking sounds and yells that he could hear down below, he thought that maybe nobody would've noticed him anyways.

 _'…I guess a few bites are better than nothing,'_ he sighed, trying to look at the brighter side.

Soon afterwards, Naruto finally arrived at Training Ground 5, Team 8's usual training joint. Walking in, he noted that it really wasn't very different from the one his team used. It looked almost the same, right down to the little lake in the center—or pond, he didn't know. It only lacked the stumps and the memorial stone.

Naruto easily spotted his two teammates in the distance, seemingly chatting with each other—he knew better.

The first one was Sasuke Uchiha. He was propped up against a tree with his arms crossed and the usual scowl on his face, his closed eyes hiding the black color that matched his spiky hair. If the surname wasn't proof enough of his lineage, the red and white fan depicted on the back of his blue shirt didn't leave any room for doubt. Sasuke also wore a pair of simple white shorts, which to Naruto, ruined whatever "cool" image he wanted so badly to uphold.

 _'Arrogant prick,'_ Naruto frowned, shifting his gaze to something much more pleasant: the girl by Sasuke's side, who incidentally was the prettiest girl he had ever seen.

Sakura Haruno's long, pink hair flowed gently in the wind, almost blending with the petals of her namesake that floated alongside it. Her eyes were of a particularly striking shade of green, contrasting nicely with the crimson qipao she wore. Though… the white circles on the shoulders and on the lower part of the dress were awkwardly out of place, in Naruto's opinion (not that he would ever say it aloud. He valued his life). Given how the dress was open on the sides and exposed her legs fully, she also wore tight green shorts to preserve her modesty, but Naruto personally had never focused on that area enough to notice it.

Seeing the two together always made Naruto's stomach churn. Sakura never spared any resources in her attempts to win Sasuke's affections, but the brooding Uchiha either shot her down on the spot or ignored her completely. That day, Sasuke went with the latter… Naruto just couldn't comprehend it; he would've given everything to have Sakura chasing after him like that.

Worse, he knew that the cheerful behavior Sakura upheld despite her failures was mostly a mask. Her negative emotions keep building up, and when she finds a suitable target to dump them on…

 _'Oh oh.'_

Sakura made eye contact with him, and for one instant, her eyes flashed a dangerous red that froze his soul.

"NARUTO!"

The distance between them began to close rapidly. Naruto knew that resistance was futile and didn't even try to escape.

"You're late!"

"Ow!"

She poked him in the chest, and Naruto swore that had no right to hurt as much as it did.

"Not as bad as Kakashi-sensei—"

"Ow!"

"—but still late!"

"Ow!"

"I told you to be on time today!"

Trembling under her smoldering gaze, Naruto rubbed his bruised chest. "S-sorry 'bout that, Sakura-chan," he chuckled nervously. "I know you said you're looking forward to today... I messed things up with my alarm, you know?"

"Oh really?" Sakura arched a brow, crossing her arms. "So you just overslept, huh?"

"N-No!" he took a couple steps back. "Well, kin—I mean… look."

Sweating under the pressure, Naruto hastily tried to explain what had happened to him that morning, but Sakura interrupted him when he neared the halfway point.

"Right. You tripped on 'something'. Very believable."

"But I rea—"

"Shut up."

Sasuke walked up to them, unfazed by the glare Naruto was sending his way. "We're already behind schedule because you're an idiot," he said, eyes then shifting to Sakura. "Questioning his excuses isn't any better. You two are only wasting our teacher's time."

The girl's shoulders slumped at the unspoken insult. "I'm sorry, Sasuke-kun…"

Between the interruption and insults, Naruto was just about to blow up at Sasuke, but his rival's last words gave him pause.

"Wasting her time? You mean… sensei's already here!?"

He looked around frantically, scanning the trees and the pink cherry blossom petals around him, but…

"Uh, I don't see anything."

Inwardly and for the billionth time, Sasuke cursed everyone involved in building his team. "You truly are hopeless."

"…Oh, you think this is funny, dontcha!?" Naruto stopped searching and began to march towards Sasuke, baring his teeth. "You liar! I'll teach you a—whoa!

Naruto jumped back as the petals that were scattered across the clearing came to life. A sudden wind picked them up, whirling them around the three genin before they converged right in front of an awestruck Naruto. With a flash, the petals disappeared as if they had never existed, leaving a displeased-looking Kurenai Yuhi in their place.

"I've been told you were bad with genjutsu, but I didn't expect for it to be to this extent," she let out a small sigh. "I know it's the season, but there aren't any cherry trees here, Naruto. Your teammates figured out that they were in a genjutsu almost immediately after they entered. I was here all along."

Kurenai expected one of three reactions from that: Naruto would either lash out at her defiantly as Kakashi said he was prone to, keep quiet but make no effort to hide a bad mood, or he'd cower in fear. She had been betting on the latter, knowing the effect her red glares tended to have on people, however…

"Wow…! You're beautiful!" he blurted out, making both of his teammates stare at him with wide eyes. _'Man, why couldn't we have her instead of Kakashi-sensei? She even got here on time!'_

The earnest, unexpected compliment brought a hint of red to Kurenai's cheeks. "E-Excuse me?"

"And man, what a cool entrance!" Naruto continued, eyes sparkling with excitement as a thought struck him. "I didn't know you could teleport using genjutsu! You're gonna teach that to us, right? Right!?"

Behind him, Sakura groaned and Sasuke just shook his head, both muttering things involving the word idiot.

In front of him, Kurenai regained her composure.

"Firstly," she raised a finger, "none of you can perform the Great Flower Escape just yet." Another finger. "Secondly, I didn't teleport—I was just hiding in plain sight! Honestly… teleportation isn't something genjutsu does! Only ninjutsu or fuuinjutsu can do that."

Seeing Naruto gulp, Kurenai tried to calm herself. She had a bad habit of getting annoyed when people were ignorant about her specialty… undoubtedly, that was seeping through her expression and tone.

"Thirdly… thank you for the compliment," she gave him a small smile. "I could tell it was honest, and not an attempt to flatter your way out of trouble."

Naruto scratched his head. "So… am I in trouble?"

"Well," her smile gained a hint of mischief, "it's not my intention. Just this once, I'm putting the blame on Kakashi for being a bad influence. But you do need a reminder about what is a genjutsu, from what I'm seeing. Would you consider that as trouble?"

"Er, well…"

"He totally does," Sakura flatly ratted him out.

"Gah! Sakura-chan…!"

Unlike Sasuke, who merely rolled his eyes, Kurenai had to laugh at Naruto's panicky reaction.

"Before we get to our lesson, I want to know a little more about you three." She sat down in the grass and motioned for her newest students to do the same. Naruto purposefully sat beside Sakura, and to the girl's visible disappointment, Sasuke walked around her to put Naruto between them.

It made Kurenai quirk an eyebrow, but she refused to comment on it.

"Let me formally introduce myself first. My name is Kurenai Yuhi, current sensei of Team 8. I'm also known as the Genjutsu Mistress, not only because it's my specialty, but because I'm our village's strongest genjutsu user, which is why the Hokage chose me to teach the genjutsu lessons for the project you three are part of."

Usually, Kurenai couldn't help herself and would add that many had compared her aptitude with genjutsu to that of an Uchiha… but given the present company, she kept her ego in check—not that kids of their age would truly understand the comparison anyways.

"I enjoy reading in my free evenings, especially while drinking some quality saké... oh, and I suppose teaching my team is a hobby of mine too. Despite it being my job, I love sharing what I know with others. The only thing I can say that I truly hate is people underestimating or belittling me because of my gender. Now, what about you kids?"

Kurenai had finished her introduction with a smile, and it shrunk each time one of the genin finished their introductions.

Naruto's was mostly identical to the one he gave to Kakashi. Knowing how much the village as a whole resented him, Kurenai truly admired Naruto's desire to become Hokage, even if she suspected his reasons weren't the best. Most importantly, she already knew she would really need to help the boy today if he truly wished to lead Konoha in the future, and it made her excited to continue the lesson.

Sakura had modified most of her introduction, now that she got used to the idea of who her teammates were. Instead of yelling out "Naruto" when prompted about what she disliked, Sakura just described him in indirectly, without mentioning his name. While she still glanced meaningfully (but more subtly) at Sasuke when talking about her likes and future, she chose to mention studying and trivia games as her hobby, and despite sounding embarrassed about it, she admitted her only future goal was to earn money to help support her family.

While that last part was fairly respectable, Kurenai found the girl's mindset to be disappointingly mundane. Sakura had a lot of potential for genjutsu according to the academy reports, but Kurenai doubted that the girl had the drive needed to grow strong enough to be the next Genjutsu Mistress… or that she was taking her profession seriously in the first place.

Sasuke, like Naruto, changed almost nothing during his second introduction. The palpable anger and hatred that Kurenai could feel when he talked about the man he aspired to kill—whose identity was obvious to her—spelled out all kinds of tragedy for the boy's future.

It left Kurenai almost as worried for him as she had been for Hinata when they first met, but she had to swallow it down. _'If I don't do my job correctly now, he won't even have a future to worry about.'_

Sasuke's ambition created a tense atmosphere that Kurenai had no choice but to try and break. "Now then. As part the Hokage's project, I will be giving you three a deeper course on genjutsu throughout the coming months. My main goal today is teaching Sasuke and Sakura the basics, and we will advance to more complex techniques in future lessons as you two become more proficient with genjutsu."

"Hey, and what about me!?"

Of course, the loudest genin of the team refused to be ignored like that.

Not that Kurenai hadn't expected the outburst. "Well, Naruto, your teammates have some aptitude for genjutsu, but you don't. I'm not saying it's impossible for you to learn genjutsu without an affinity... but tell me, which of the three academy jutsu made you fail to graduate?"

Scowling, he crossed his arms and turned his head away. "That stupid Clone Jutsu," he confirmed her suspicions. "But who cares if I can't do it!? Shadow clones are way cooler!"

"The issue is not that you can't, but _why_ you can't."

Sasuke scoffed at those words. "Isn't it just because he didn't pay attention in class?"

"That probably didn't help, but Naruto's problem is with his chakra reserves and control," Kurenai said, turning to the boy in question. "If you have no problems with the Shadow Clone Jutsu but struggle with the Clone Jutsu… it means your reserves are very large for your age, and your control is poor. The Clone Jutsu requires very little chakra, so the larger your reserves, the harder it is for you to get the right amount."

A bulb lit up above Sakura's head. "So when I do a clone, it's like… 10% of my chakra, but for Naruto it would be about 5% or less… is that right, Kurenai-sensei?"

"Exactly," Kurenai confirmed, despite feeling that the proportion would be far, far lower. "It's much more difficult for someone born with such large reserves to execute a clone jutsu, and genjutsu would be even harder."

 _'So I had a handicap all along,'_ Naruto realized with a slight frown. _'Though I would've never learned the Shadow Clone Jutsu if it wasn't for that, so… I guess it worked out in the end.'_

"Thus," Kurenai continued, drawing his attention, "today your job is to be our guinea pig: your teammates will cast genjutsu on you and you will be breaking them over and over again."

"…What!? But this is dumb!" Naruto yelled as he rose to two feet. "I don't want to be a training dummy!"

Kurenai sighed, closing her eyes. _'It seems I'll have to show him why this is important the hard way, just like with Kiba...'_

"How's that even going to help me become Hokage!?"

"Ah, yes…" Kurenai also got up. "You did say something to that effect, didn't you?"

She drew a kunai from her pouch with a flourish and in slow, measured steps, began to walk towards him with a predatory glint in her eyes.

Before Naruto knew it, his legs were taking him backwards... but his teammates were as still as statues.

"G-Guys! Watch out!"

The only one to react was Kurenai, who smirked as she strolled right between Sasuke and Sakura. "Don't worry about them. In fact…"

Naruto's back collided with a tree that _definitively_ hadn't been there before.

"Don't worry about becoming Hokage either."

When his eyes darted back to Kurenai, he saw her body distorting in a spiral pattern until it became a black mist that dissipated in the air

"She's gone…? But—what the!?"

The roots of the tree clamped up on Naruto's body, coiling around him like snakes and restraining his limbs. Not that he could move; the sight of a kunai held only inches away from his neck paralyzed him from head to toe.

"You can't do _anything_ against genjutsu," Kurenai whispered from behind him, so close that his neck tingled because of her breath. "And you will never be Hokage if even a genin can easily trap and kill you with a mere C-rank illusion. But I have good news," she purred sweetly. "You won't have the chance to experience that feeling."

She shifted her grip on the kunai, aiming the sharp tip at Naruto's neck. "It'll be quick," she promised. "You'll feel cold for a while, but that's all."

Her arm reared back and Naruto _screamed._ His eyes closed reflexively when the blade darted towards him, plunging him into darkness.

…And then came the cold.

Naruto had closed his eyes only for one second, but the array of differences between these two moments of sight assaulted him so suddenly that it almost left him dizzy.

He heard someone laughing, almost hysterically.

He couldn't feel a tree pressed up against his back anymore, nor the roots that had restrained him. Instead, he only felt a flowing, cool wetness flowing down his head, making him shiver as it drenched him through his clothes.

His blond hair became a curtain that impaired his vision, but he could still see his teammates on the grass. Sasuke had turned just enough to allow him to see his infuriating smirk, and Naruto had to suppress that familiar urge to make his eye—which was shining with amusement—black in more ways than one.

On the other hand, Sakura was lying on her back, trembling from her uncontrollable laughter. "That," she wheezed, wiping tears from her eyes, "was just _priceless…_!"

A kunai sliced through the air from somewhere behind Naruto, burying itself by his feet with a dull thud. An empty water bottle soon followed, bouncing on the grass.

"Do you understand now, Naruto?"

He kept silent, which Kurenai took as a yes. She then moved around, standing between him and his teammates. "So, which one of you can explain to us what is a genjutsu?"

Sakura, who had yet to get up, raised her hand. "I-I'll do it, just… gimme a minute…!"

"Very well."

While waiting for Sakura to catch her breath, Kurenai went to recover her bottle and kunai, which accidentally put her face-to-face with Naruto. His posture and expression… they were guarded and angry at the same time.

It dawned on her that she made a mistake.

 _'…Ugh. Way to go, Kurenai,'_ she shoved the kunai and bottle inside pouches her dress kept hidden.

Seeing the distrust in his gaze, Kurenai realized she hadn't thought things through. Naruto and Kiba were similar, yes, but there was one crucial difference between them that her methods hadn't considered. Kiba took the water as a reminder of who the true "alpha" of the pack was, but Naruto's past would make him interpret that action very differently.

 _'I guess all that happened yesterday is still affecting me if I couldn't see something this obvious coming from a mile away…'_

"Naruto?" she approached the boy and crouched to his level, keeping her voice in a low, soothing tone. "Can we talk for a moment?"

"…What do you want?" he asked with a bluntness that almost made the woman wince.

"Listen. I didn't do this to be mean or because I hate you, I just wanted you to understand how critical it is for you to do what I'm asking. I can't do much to make you stronger, yes, but I can help you overcome this weakness. Genjutsu isn't lethal by itself, but this can get you _killed_ , Naruto. Do you really understand why I did all of this?"

He looked down.

Unlike when he faced Mizuki, there were no good news to make him forget about the lethality of the situation. He could see her point perfectly.

However… the _humiliation_ that followed was not so easy to understand. From his perspective, if Kurenai's aim was simply to teach him a lesson he'd never forget, then there was no need for her to dump water on him like that afterward.

"… Yeah, I get it," he muttered, refusing to face her.

If he had, he'd have the guilt flashing across her eyes. Kurenai knew she'd have to somehow earn his trust, and she decided to start small.

"Can you give me your jacket, please?"

Though he eyed her woman with suspicion, Naruto unzipped the wet jacket and handed it over. To his surprise, Kurenai just wrung the water out of it and walked away to a nearby tree, on which she tied up the jacket and left it to dry.

A considerate gesture, but he wasn't fully convinced.

"Hey, and what about this?" he asked when she returned, looking down at his plain black shirt. It wasn't completely soaked, but much of its upper half was uncomfortably sticky.

"That? Er…" she motioned for him to come closer and whispered in his ear: "Your seal will show up if you use chakra. Sorry, but you'll have to bear it."

"Huh. I didn't know that… well, okay," he shrugged, trying to ignore the weird look the other two were sending their way. "The sun will take care of it, I guess…"

Naruto couldn't say he was happy about Kurenai or this "prank" she had pulled on him… but he had to admit, she knew what she was doing. Despite being 100% sure the lesson would be horribly boring, he was actually willing to listen to it—she _proved_ to him how important this knowledge was. It was more that could be said from his old academy teachers, as even Iruka lacked the patience to explain these things to him.

The two then joined Sakura and Sasuke, and seeing that the girl had regained her composure, Kurenai motioned for her to begin.

"Alright," Sakura straightened. "To put it simply, a genjutsu is when you use your chakra to mess with someone's nervous system. You can make an enemy see, feel, smell, hear and even taste things that don't exist, distracting the person so the user or their team can finish them off or flee. You can make the illusion work on a specific person, group, or make it affect anyone within a certain range."

"Excellent!" Kurenai offered her a wide smile. "That's a perfect description of what genjutsu is. It seems you really grasped the concepts you were taught in the academy, Sakura."

"Oh, that was nothing special," the girl rebutted, idly playing with her hair in a show of embarrassment. "Anyone that listened a little in class could've told you that..."

Sakura's inner thoughts were nowhere as humble as she sounded. _'Hah! I'm so awesome! Now that even someone as renowned as Kurenai-sensei praised my intelligence, surely Sasuke-kun will—"_

"Hn. That was just the basics."

 _'…agree with me…!?'_

"Man," Naruto began, unaware that Sakura's spirit was crumbling into dust at that very second, "that stuff sounds really strong… there's gotta be a way to deal with it, right?"

"Of course," Kurenai said. "Genjutsu in general has two main weaknesses. Firstly, it's an art that requires much more chakra control and dedication when compared with ninjutsu and taijutsu of the same level, so most people that focus on it aren't as skilled with those other arts."

"Oh, I gotcha," Naruto cracked his knuckles, grinning. "You mean we gotta ambush 'em, huh!?"

"Yes. Your average genjutsu-user needs teammates to cover for them, and sometimes the teammates also rely on the illusions to find openings. But," she smiled cryptically, "an ambush is always advantageous, and not always possible."

The blond deflated, brows knitting together "Well, that's true…"

"That's where the second weakness comes in: the stronger genjutsu you'd see in battles tend to warp the victim's sense of time. If you spend an entire minute in an illusion, it's unlikely that even three seconds have actually passed in the real world… which gives you plenty of time to break the genjutsu and react."

Naruto's expression of unease remained unchanged, and Kurenai's soon matched it. "You… don't know about breaking genjutsu," she realized.

The review would take more time than she had expected.

"Knowing him, I bet he skipped that class," Sakura piped in, lips twisting in disgust.

Naruto only smiled sheepishly at that.

"Of course," Sasuke scoffed. "Typical."

"Shut up, Sasuke! Nobody asked you," Naruto snarled.

"Actually," Kurenai crossed her arms, "I'll ask it. Sasuke, can you explain to Naruto the two ways he could've escaped the Demonic Illusion: Tree Binding Death? You were the top genin of your class, so I trust you know that much."

The Uchiha met her challenge with a dissatisfied, bored look. "He could've stopped his chakra flow and then expelled the genjutsu's chakra out of his system, or he could've forced his body out of the illusion by recalibrating his senses with a strong external stimulus."

"Uhhh... Did you really have to use all those complicated words?" Naruto whined, frowning confusedly.

Kurenai opened her mouth, but Sakura was faster. "Naruto, remember that bit about genjutsu messing with your senses? You can get your body to 'wake up' if you stimulate any of them hard enough. It's almost always easier to work with tact: just bite your lip or tongue—it has to _hurt—_ and you're out. If what Kurenai-sensei said earlier about your chakra reserves is true, you should probably just forget that stuff about chakra flow."

"Hm," Naruto scratched his chin. "Okay. That actually sounds pretty simple…" he muttered to himself.

"Well," Kurenai began. "Sasuke, your explanation was correct but Naruto has a point—keep your audience in mind when explaining things."

"It's not my fault he's an idiot."

"Hey! You—"

" _As for Sakura,_ " Kurenai raised her voice, glaring at the boys for a second, "your simplification was also correct, but I think Naruto is capable of doing the chakra flow method; we'll try that out later. Lastly," her eyes landed on Naruto, "you too are correct. Breaking out of a genjutsu is simple… but the real difficulty lies in figuring out you're in one.

"Now, before we move on to practice, I want to cover the last way to escape genjutsu: teamwork."

"Kurenai-sensei," Sakura's arm shot up, "can I explain that one too!?"

The woman chuckled in response. "While I appreciate your enthusiasm, I suppose I shouldn't let you and Sasuke handle all the explanations."

"Wait a sec," Naruto spoke up, "didn't you say there were only two ways?"

"I said two ways _you_ could've escaped from an illusion," she corrected him. "Going back to what your teammates said: genjutsu works because a subtle amount of the user's chakra affects the victim's nervous system. Your body can't detect so little foreign chakra on its own, but when you stop your flow it becomes obvious. It's just a matter of pushing it out with your own chakra afterwards—how much depends on the genjutsu's strength. Do you three follow so far?"

They nodded.

"Good. If a teammate notices you are in a genjutsu, they can help by touching you and sending some of their chakra into your body. Since they aren't making any attempt at masking their chakra, your body will react and try to flush it out, which ends up destabilizing the genjutsu and breaking it. And… that's it for the theory. Any last questions?"

One look at their faces told her that all of them were confident in their understanding of the concepts they discussed. She didn't expect less from Sakura or Sasuke, but just to be sure, Kurenai spent a couple minutes quizzing Naruto on all that they had discussed until that point.

The result…?

"Bravo!" she applauded him, prideful. "You got all of them right!"

Naruto, unused to be praised, blushed and scratched his head. 'Well… I guess she's not that bad.'

"Color me surprised," Sakura commented off-handedly. "You actually paid attention for once."

"Yes, and I'm glad he did," Kurenai confessed as she calmly got up. "Now we can finally move on to practice."

"Great!"

In contrast to her teammates and Kurenai, Sakura practically jumped to two feet. "So we're finally going to learn some genjutsu, right!?"

"Oh my," Kurenai smirked, amused at how the girl was leaning forward with her fists pumped. "You sound surprisingly excited about this."

"Heh, Sakura-chan's been talking about learning from you all week," Naruto commented, earning a brief pouting glare from Sakura, who couldn't help but blush.

"Sorry Kurenai-sensei," the girl muttered, shifting in her feet. "It's just… I can't help it. Back at the academy, our teachers kept saying I could be great with genjutsu but they never taught any, and Kakashi-sensei just wants to focus on teamwork… but now?" she grinned widely. "I'll finally have cool jutsu in my arsenal! How awesome is that?"

"…Cool jutsu?" Sasuke just looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "You're looking _and_ sounding exactly like Naruto right now."

 _'…Huh?'_

At that moment, alarm bells began to ring in Naruto's head. He saw Sakura' fingers trembling as she closed them into a tight fist, and though she still wore a pleasant smile, the odd way her wide-open eyes began to twitch twisted the expression completely.

He knew those signs.

Sakura's neck slowly spun sideways until she was facing Sasuke. "What did you say, Sasuke-kun…?"

As fast and silently as he could, Naruto backed away and took cover behind Kurenai, much to the woman's complete befuddlement.

"I… said you're acting like Naruto," Sasuke replied, his stoic tone betraying some confusion at the… intense way Sakura stared at him. "You were talking ab—hngh!?"

Sakura pounced on him, grabbing him by the collar in such a way that his feet actually left the ground.

"You jerk! How _dare_ you compare me to Naruto!?" she screamed, shaking him violently. "I'm nothing like that idiot, you hear!? _Nothing!_ "

"S-Sakura-chan, you're going to kill him…!"

The girl froze at those words. Her brain quickly caught up with what she had done, and when that happened…

"Oh no!"

"Argh!"

…She dropped Sasuke, who stumbled backwards, fell, and hit his head on the ground.

"Ah, Sasuke-kun! I'm sorry, I-I don't know what came over me," Sakura stammered, hurrying to his side. "Are you hurt? Is it bleeding!?"

Still hidden behind Kurenai, Naruto huffed at the scene unfolding in front of him. "If it was me it would be all punches and no apologies… this sucks."

Meanwhile, Kurenai closed her eyes to center herself and tried to make sense of the mess that was Team 7.

 _'Kakashi was completely right in his initial report. They have potential—'_

"Dammit Sakura, get off me! You're annoying!"

"Sasuke-kun, please don't be mad at me! I didn't want to call you a jerk!"

Kurenai heard Naruto stomping towards the other two, growling.

"What does he have that I don't, Sakura-chan!?"

 _'—but as long as they get on each other's throats like this—'_

"Shut up Naruto! Sasuke-kun's much cooler than you and—ow! That hurt!"

"Serves you right. If you listened to me the first time then I wouldn't have to push you."

"Hey, if you don't stop bothering her I'll beat you up!"

 _'—they'll never be fit for much more than a D-rank mission. This is a big problem...'_

"Like you could even touch me, loser."

"What was that!? You bastard...!"

"Sasuke-kun, show him wh—!

" _Enough!_ "

"…"

"…"

"…"

The genin silently moved away from each other.

"Disappointing," Kurenai crossed her arms, glaring icily at all three.

Both Naruto and Sakura looked away in shame, but Sasuke held a sour, defiant expression of someone who didn't believe they were in the wrong.

"Let's not waste more of our time," the woman sighed wearily as she took out a scroll from her pouch and created two Shadow Clones. "This scroll has a few extremely basic, harmless D-rank genjutsu. Sasuke, Sakura, today we'll cover two of the simplest ones. Naruto, you'll be their target so you can practice breaking out of genjutsu. Once I'm satisfied with everyone's progress, I'll start casting illusions on all of you so you can improve your attention to detail and practice how to get your teammates out of an illusion, and we'll keep that up until lunch break. Are we clear?"

Seeing there were no objections, the clones approached Sakura and Sasuke while Naruto flopped on the grass again to wait until his teammates were ready to experiment on him.

Kurenai didn't truly need the second clone, but this time she chose to keep herself free. She needed to think.

 _'These three will be in grave danger if they are like this during the mission tomorrow._ _Is there anything I can do to fix this situation?'_

What Kurenai forgot that day, is that when one tries to fix a problem, they risk creating another…

* * *

A/N:

Before you people freak out: Hinata's panic attack is NOT because she fears that losing to Hanabi means being sealed. Her fear is about something else entirely, as you'll see next chapter. (I feel bad for setting up her day as something great only to drop that on her, lol).

This was our first look at Hinata, and I hope you guys liked my interpretation of the character. There's still a lot more to see, but I hope this showcases well the foundation of her personality.

This chapter's second half is setting up the basis for some of Sakura and Sasuke's expanded character development, and to a lesser extent Naruto's, but you will only see hints of where I'm going with this once I get back to Team 7 in chapter 4, though chapter 5 will state outright what my plan is. Hopefully the bickering wasn't too annoying...

And, well... hope you enjoyed the genjutsu talk, too. I like to touch a bit on mechanics because it's stuff I enjoy reading about, but that's not the only reason I wrote that. It's also an important lesson for Naruto (who truly graduated without knowing how to deal with genjutsu since Jiraiya taught that to him in canon).

As a brief note on Sakura, I thought that being compared to Naruto was a suitable "berserk button" for her. She prides herself on her intelligence after all, so not even Sasuke can get away with that particular comment.

Anyways, I hope you guys stick around for the next chapter, which will be exclusively about Team 8 and Kakashi!

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts about the chapter!

* * *

Changelog:

v1.0.1 (10/25/15) – Same stuff as v1.0.1 from chapter 1.

2.0 (11/07/15) – Improved the grammar, as well as Hinata and Hiashi's characterization. Modified Kurenai's attitude according to reviewer _ZeroKaze_ 's feedback.

2.1 (11/20/15) – Small fixes here and there. Mostly focused on the flashback/dream, especially the part about Naruto. Added details about Kurenai's training in the A/Ns.

v2.1.1 (12/20/15) – Small fixes in the flashback/dream, thanks to my friend Levi for pointing them out!

v2.5 (07/05/16) – Restructured/got rid of some lines, erased typos. Altered some parts about Kurenai's behavior to make it clearer that Chapter 1's events were taking a toll on her, based on a few reviews.

v2.6 (02/12/17) – Fixed typos and restructured a few lines, again. Added little tidbits here and there.

v2.7 (07/02/17) – Deleted allusions to future events of The Last on Hinata's dream and modified a couple bits to match her semi-canon bedroom, which actually exists in the anime.

V3.0 (09/24/17) – _Many_ changes to the structure to improve flow, grammar and consistency with later chapters. Particularly, Hinata's backstory now fully matches the continuity of C19/20, and much of the characterization for everyone was polished. The chapter's name was also changed to better reflect its content.

Hinata's dream: The sequence is less awkward, and much of it was rewritten. I showed Hinata's drive to please her father, expanded on the bullying, and all content from Naruto's POV has been eliminated since it's HINATA's dream. (Some of that stuff remained, transformed into her observations).

Hinata's present: Essentially rewrote the ENTIRE thing, though the greater sequence of events remains. Noteworthy changes include Hinata losing motivation for her training and regaining it because Naruto graduated, her crush towards Naruto has been toned down considerably in terms of what drives her to connect with him, some interactions between Hinata and the kitchen staff are now a thing, Hanabi's recent birthday was acknowledged the red scarf becomes more relevant, Hinata's training with Hiashi was made explicit, Hiashi's moment has a very different tone and ends with Hinata suffering a panic attack.

Team 7's scene: Mostly adapted to flow better. Sakura's violence was toned down considerably due to a few reviews, in particular _Darth Onixia_ 's, and the entire sequence between Naruto spotting his team and Kurenai showing up was changed. Sakura's introduction has extra details than canon's. Deleted redundant paragraphs about Team 7's skill set. Made the Great Flower Escape hit only Naruto (and thus I had to make Sakura's excitement about learning genjutsu come from somewhere else), his subsequent panic became less humiliating in the narration, and made Kurenai deal with Naruto's wariness ASAP. Significantly shortened the genjutsu lecture, eliminated the Sharingan references, made Sasuke trigger Sakura by accident rather than intentionally, and restructured the rest.


	3. Chapter 3 - The Highest Stakes

Hello everyone!

Many of you should have guessed an action scene is incoming, because of Kakashi's test. Well, in my original version of the fic, I had certain intentions… and they led to all the action being in chapter 4 instead. Mostly so I could get isolated feedback on what had been my first action scene ever, as there is quite a bit going on here. Because of length and a couple other reasons, I'm sticking to the plan. But don't think that means this chapter is devoid of important content!

Anyways, this chapter will "mostly" be about Team 8. How do you guys feel about getting an expanded, different perspective on a previous scene before we see how Hinata and her friends are doing?

Key warning: Remember how I mentioned in Chapter 1 that the Hokage can be vetoed by his council if _everyone_ disagrees with him? This setup returns to limit the power of another character. Much like with the Hokage, I'm avoiding the "council is a hive mind" trope, but I'll only cover that council's individuality later in Chapter 20.

* * *

 _The Prologue_

Chapter 3: The Highest Stakes (v3.0)

* * *

Even though he knew he didn't deserve to be called as such, Hiashi Hyuuga couldn't fight the fact that in his heart, he was a father. It was just impossible for him not to worry about Hinata after he noticed how oddly his daughter was behaving as they talked in the dojo.

If only he could act like a father as well and simply ask her what was wrong… it would have been so simple. However, no matter how much it killed him on the inside, he knew it was far, far too late to be the caring father that he had tried to be during Hinata's early childhood.

He just couldn't do anything. Not because of any interference from the outside world, no… the only thing that held Hiashi back was, almost always, merely himself.

However, there were situations where he absolutely _had_ to act. He had a duty to protect his child from harm, and at least that was something he knew he could bring himself to do.

Thus, seeking more information, he posed a simple, almost random question about her day just to force a reaction. It was admirable to him that she tried to keep herself whole as she told him about her future training session with Kakashi, but it also hurt him deeply. He knew that her deep fear of _his_ reaction was the only reason she didn't break down in front of him.

Hiashi soon realized that it would be for the best if he left the dojo right away. Perhaps it was the weight of his stern gaze, or even just his presence that affected her so negatively… it didn't matter. He could feel that him being there was causing Hinata enough distress to make her rooted to the spot out of raw nervousness. Forcing her to leave wouldn't end well, he was sure.

But just as much as he knew he had to leave, his instincts _screamed_ at him that something was wrong with Hinata, that he needed to stay and protect her.

He soon found a compromise. It was a case where he had to break the rules.

Privacy was a concept Byakugan-users had grown to respect even before the Hyuuga clan's formation, and every person capable of the ability was educated from their early days to diligently uphold that value, but there was no other option.

He activated his eyes the moment he turned his back on Hinata, even before he closed the sliding door behind him to separate them—a meaningless barrier to the Byakugan, but it made all the difference for the girl's psyche.

The next ten minutes were grueling for them both.

It hadn't taken him more than a few seconds of watching Hinata trembling on the courtyard's floor after she ran away and collapsed for Hiashi to realize she was "just" having a panic attack. There was no danger to her life and, thus, no true need for his interference… but almost as if he were a statue guarding the dojo's door, he stood there, forcing himself to watch every single second of her suffering.

Those ten long minutes were but a part of his self-imposed punishment. To witness the consequences of how badly he failed at being a father, a husband, a clan head, and a human being—to torture himself with that knowledge.

He knew he deserved it.

It was a hard fight against his own body to stop himself from tearing down the dojo's door and hurrying to Hinata's side. To stop himself from being the father he wanted to be, and the father one part of him knew she needed him to be in that moment.

The father he knew he could never be… even if he were to try.

It had taken him almost five years after his wife's death for Hiashi to finally gather the courage to start facing reality once again, and even after that, it still took him _months_ to realize how much damage he had caused and was _still_ causing to his daughters. That, especially with Hinata, he was doing everything wrong and failing in every step of the way.

Yet, unlike many times in the past, neither his cowardice nor his fear of not being enough were what ultimately shackled him.

He continued to watch Hinata with his Byakugan until she eventually regained her strength. Slowly, she rose to her feet, supporting herself on the wall to compensate for her shaky legs—a task that her backpack full of food only made harder. She remained there only for about a minute, until a jolt of surprise shook her body and made her break into a dash.

He had no doubt his daughter had just remembered her training appointment. What he did doubt… was if she'd have the willpower to keep forcing herself to work as a kunoichi if she knew she knew about his lie.

That lie was his newest shackle. The truth he kept hidden from Hinata… as cruel as his inertia seemed, he knew that giving in to his heart's demands was the _cruelest_ action he could take at that moment. He was already going to hurt her enough after the duel, but betraying innocent feelings on top of it?

He deactivated his eyes, shoulders sagging with a deep sigh as he, too, walked away from the dojo.

There was a limit to how much someone's heart could endure before it broke for good. He couldn't risk to push her anymore closer to that point than he already had.

Eventually, Hiashi entered a familiar hallway among the many identical ones in his labyrinth-like home. This one's only door led to his office, from where he could hear someone's voice, thanks to the door left ajar.

"What…? Why is this place such a mess? It's almost like a tornado passed through here!"

Hiashi cringed. He didn't know who was there besides that, from the voice, it was a woman… but he knew exactly what they were seeing.

"Oh no," the person gasped. "Could it be that a thief broke in!?"

Sculpting his features into an emotionless mask that had no traces of embarrassment, Hiashi began to walk forcefully so that his footsteps would echo towards whoever was in his office as a silent warning. In response, a head peeked out from the room, warily looking around the hallway until she spotted him.

"H-Hiashi-sama?!" the woman gasped, panic flashing across her features. She promptly hopped into the hallway and bowed low. "G-Good morning, Hiashi-sama!"

To his carefully hidden surprise, it was just a maid. He acknowledged her with a single nod, not stopping until he was by the door. A mere glance inside the room confirmed what the duster she held suggested: she had been about to clean his office. The cleaning cart in the middle of the room couldn't make things more obvious.

"I… I—please forgive me, Hiashi-sama," she blurted out in a trembling tone. "but I haven't finished my duties just yet and—"

"It's of no consequence," he said with a pacifying gesture, making the maid visibly relax. "This "mess", as you put it, is my responsibility. I'll handle that, and you can come later in the day to finish what you were meant to do."

With that order, he walked past the confused maid and into his office. The layout was quite similar to the Hokage's, except the room was much smaller and there were two pairs of bookshelves beside his desk, filled to the brim with books and scrolls... that is, on a normal day.

There were various empty spaces on the bookshelves, the desk was overflowing with books and open scrolls, so much that some scrolls had fallen and rolled away on the floor along with a few piles of books that hadn't fit on the desk. Considering he had always left everything in its proper place before locking up the office, he couldn't fault the maid for reacting like she did.

"Please excuse me," she said as she quickly reached for the cart and started to push it away. Hiashi paid her no mind as he went to sit in his chair, but raised an eyebrow when the maid stopped by the doorway and lingered.

"Uh… f-forgive my curiosity," she turned around, "and perhaps my ignorance, but… shouldn't you be giving start to the breakfast ceremony right now, Hiashi-sama?"

He blinked. It dawned on him that it was practically 7 a.m and he was one hour early to work, which is why he crossed paths with this maid.

"…Yes. I should."

Inwardly, he cursed himself. His lack of sleep was catching up to him if he managed to forget his duties so easily...

His brain scrambled for a solution, leaving the maid to frown uneasily over the awkward silence for a few instants.

"I need you to do something before resuming your usual duties," he said.

The maid stood straight, attentive.

"There are extremely important matters that need my attention right now. Tell my father that he will have to begin the ceremony in my stead."

"Understood. I will inform Hiroshi-sama immediately," she replied. "Would you want me to bring a plate of food here, Hiashi-sama?"

"…No. I already had breakfast."

A lie. Despite his stomach's disagreements, he knew eating would only slow him down.

The maid bowed once again and left, closing the door on her way out.

The moment she was gone was the moment his face went from the strong, icy mask of the Hyuuga clan's leader… to his real, unguarded expression of tiredness. Of someone that barely had any energy left but still had to keep going. Of someone that had stayed up until four in the morning neck-deep into books and scrolls, desperately hoping he'd find a way out…

Of someone that prayed for a miracle that, deep down, he knew was not going to come.

Without even realizing it, Hiashi brought his hand towards the handle of one of his desk's drawers. The hand hovered over the handle, tempted, _yearning_ … but that was as far as it went before Hiashi forced it back, allowing himself no more than a gaze full of longing and sadness at what most people would perceive just as a simple drawer.

To Hiashi… it was his treasure chest.

It had been over six years since he had last opened it, but he could still remember clearly the drawer's contents: a simple photo, and the most precious of memories.

It was an image of a beautiful woman with long, blue hair, dressed in a summer kimono of the same color and in her arms was brown-haired baby girl wrapped up in a yellow blanket, sleeping peacefully. A young girl was in front of the woman, dressed in a black-and-white kimono. Though the girl's hair was much shorter, it was of the exact same color as the woman's—one of the many physical traits the two shared.

His wife, Hikari Hyuuga, and his two daughters, Hinata and Hanabi.

Behind them was a big garden filled with flowers and plants of the most varied colors and sizes, but in front of the trio was only a patch of purple sunflowers. Those had just bloomed during that summer, thanks to the dedication and love of Hikari and Hinata had put into caring for them, and that accomplishment was what led to the pride and glee reflected in their wide, bright smiles.

Hiashi knew that even if his heart had the strength to endure the sight, he couldn't open his chest and gaze upon his treasure again, which he had once displayed proudly in a frame atop his desk.

He was unworthy. And he knew… he'd never be worthy again.

Not after the last night.

Hiashi had many happy memories of the days he spent with his wife, but the one at the forefront of his mind was far from fond. It was his last memory of Hikari, when she, on her deathbed, used her last breath and her last tears to make him promise that he would never let _that_ happen to their daughters.

He promised it. Immediately.

At the time, he thought he'd never have to do anything to uphold it, but he had been too naïve… and now, there was nothing he could do to stop that promise from shattering.

Just like he couldn't stop his brother Hizashi from sacrificing himself for his sake... and just like he couldn't stop Hikari's disease from taking her from him, he was once again a mere spectator, able to do nothing more outside of watching idly as his family was about to be ruined.

Again.

The room was engulfed by the sound of a fist crashing down on wood.

He _hated_ that feeling of powerlessness. He had thought there was no worse feeling… but now he knew better.

Being powerless and unable to protect his loved ones from something that was _completely_ his own fault was a thousand times worse.

And yet, he resisted. A part of him couldn't accept that was the end.

"This is no time for self-pity," he scowled as he chastised himself, closing his eyes to force back unshed tears of frustration and grief.

Looking over the chaos of documents all over his desk, Hiashi decided to invest a minute or two into reorganizing everything before diving in once again.

"There has to be something I overlooked. This is such an unusual case… there _has_ to be something I can use."

Unusual was truly the perfect word to describe the situation.

As he had told Hinata minutes before, she and her sister had different responsibilities towards the clan due to their different positions in the line of succession. Though the heir (or heiress, in this case) had the biggest ones, as they would be groomed to lead the clan one day, the clan head's other children still had important roles to play.

He knew the possibility of actually losing her title had never crossed Hinata's mind, just as he had a fair idea of what caused her panic attack… and that's where his lie had entered the picture.

It still didn't quite register for Hiashi. The topic of Hanabi becoming the heiress had been brought up on occasion during council meetings over the past few years as she bloomed faster than Hinata, but no conclusion had been ever reached. Though the elders in the council had some common roles, they all had their own opinions and arguments for and against that measure. The topic was simply too divisive and uncertain.

As the clan head, Hiashi's opinion was the one that held the most weight. The entire council would have to be against him to overrule his decisions in any given matter… he just had never imagined it would actually happen.

Not only did it happen, it also didn't end there.

What he had been too scared to tell Hinata was that if she lost the duel with her sister—and he knew she would—then she wouldn't just lose her title.

She'd lose her freedom.

She'd lose position as a main house member and her place in the line of succession.

Hinata would be sealed.

He would have to seal his own daughter. The mere thought made his blood turn cold.

Hikari had bound him with a promise and Hiashi couldn't deny it was a big part of why he feared this outcome so much. What she had shared with him… the possibility that Hinata could be exposed to those horrors because of the exploitability of the Caged Bird Seal was an unbearable thought. It had haunted him throughout the night, single-handedly keeping him focused on his task.

But as his search yielded no results, Hiashi's mind wandered… and it led him to another possibility that scared him far more than the moment he had seen Hinata in the arms of that diplomat from Kumo.

Because he had led Hinata to see herself as the clan's biggest failure when he was by far the rightful owner of that title… he knew it. He knew how devastating a failure of that magnitude would be to her.

He didn't know if she could withstand it.

And so Hiashi kept going. He swiftly organized his workplace and he once again went to drown himself in books and scrolls about the laws, traditions and history of the Hyuuga clan—anything that could give them a way out.

No matter how many hours of sleep or uneaten meals it would cost him… it was nigh time for him to start making up for his failures.

* * *

"At least… I made it in time," Hinata skidded to a halt, panting heavily. "Probably..."

The girl was underneath the wooden gate that served as the entrance to Training Ground 3, doubled over as she struggled to regain her breath after running nonstop all the way from the Hyuuga manor.

Once her body recovered from that storm of horrible sensations and feelings that struck her after her father left the dojo, the first thought that popped in her head had been the very last one she had before everything went wrong: that she would be late if she didn't hurry.

Hinata would have loved to fool herself into believing that her fear of upsetting her teammates and Naruto's sensei was what pushed her forward through Konoha's streets… but no. She ran solely so she could focus on something besides the thoughts that triggered her attack, forcing herself to be too busy to linger on those thoughts.

"Ha… hahaha…"

Somehow, the notion that she had been literally running away from her own mind made her laugh, almost drowning out that dark voice in her head that finally caught up to remind her that she was foolish for trying to escape. To remind her that she was pathetic and barely handled ten minutes of running... that it was no wonder everyone wanted Hanabi to be the heiress instead of a failure.

Her logical side came to her defense, comforting her with the fact that she had been drained of her energy before she even started to run. It blamed the dark voice for that—for _everything—_ and Hinata clung to that idea desperately, bringing her peace even if just for a moment.

She didn't stay near the gate for long, unwilling to put all that running to waste by arriving late anyway. Wiping the sweat from her brow with her hand and drying it on the hem of her jacket with a pang of disgust, Hinata sluggishly began to move.

Braving a small road surrounded by trees, Hinata soon stumbled into a familiar-looking clearing. It resembled the training ground she and her team frequented, with the only meaningful difference being a trio of wooden posts in the middle of it and a stone monument to the side, shaped in a way that resembled a kunai.

Hinata also saw that she wasn't the first to arrive. Though she couldn't make out more than his silhouette from where she was, she knew that it was Shino Aburame, one of her teammates. He was always early to team meetings, so his presence was no surprise to her.

Shino had a dark bush of brown hair and, as always, his face was mostly hidden behind his dark sunglasses and the high collar of his light gray jacket. That resulted in many people struggling to read him —a group that Hinata was sad to still see herself included. Simple brown shorts rounded out his suspicious getup, contrasting it completely.

He was standing beside one of the wooden posts, staring right in her direction. Hinata knew it was because he had sent a little, harmless bug to live with her, which allowed him to detect when she was nearby. While Hinata still wasn't totally over how _creepy_ it was to have a bug on her 24/7… nonetheless, she was glad to have Shino in her life.

With other people, she always felt lacking from a socialization standpoint, but Shino operated in a different wavelength. He gave her as much time as she needed to put her thoughts into words, and was fully comfortable with spending time in silence if they didn't have anything to say. Hinata felt as if she wasn't failing him with her struggle to find the right of words as soon as possible like she did with everyone else... it was liberating, in a way.

She had a feeling that he was glad to have someone that was actually willing to listen to him, too, given how their old classmates found him boring and weird and isolated him for it. Shino was a sharp person, and be it a long tirade about bugs, his analysis of a book or even smaller observations about the world around them, Hinata always found he had something interesting to say and gave him as much attention as she could.

To her surprise, his behavior even extended to his reactions to her mistakes during missions or training. She had thought he'd be just like her father in that regard, but Shino was usually far more preoccupied with telling her _where_ she went wrong, and if he could, how to fix it.

Of course, his reaction wasn't always positive, such as that time when she had ruined a D-rank mission by tripping and knocking over some paint buckets all over their client's yard… but at least he didn't berate her for her mistakes. He merely told her that she was capable of better.

It made everything sting less, at least.

When she finally got close enough, Shino nodded in greeting. Hinata barely managed a little wave in return before the sharp noise of a page turning drew her attention elsewhere.

In the shade, leaning against a nearby tree, was a man dressed in a jonin uniform, reading a small orange book. _'So this must be Kakashi-sensei…'_

Glancing between the two for a moment, Hinata silently apologized to Shino and went towards Kakashi instead. Though she made no attempt to be stealthy in her approach, Kakashi was apparently too engrossed in his reading to notice her, even when she was but a couple meters away from him.

The girl began to fidget. On one hand, she knew she should greet her new sensei and show him respect. On the other, he was clearly busy and she didn't want to be a bother and have him mad at her, so how should she capture his attention?

"Yo. You're Hinata, right?"

She bit back a squeak.

Kakashi just flipped another page, eyes still glued to his book.

"Ah… y-yes."

She should've known better to expect a jonin to be so unaware.

"Hmm. Good to know."

He didn't say another word afterwards, leaving Hinata lost in the awkward silence that arose. Gulping, she began to debate with herself on what her next move would be. In the end, just to be sure, she offered him a small, rigid bow and excused herself, her voice barely above a whisper.

She left tense, hoping Kakashi wouldn't call her back and yell at her for the being insolent, but allowed herself to relax when he didn't. He truly had been as casual as his greeting suggested.

The relief allowed her to give Shino a small smile when she finally reached him.

"Good morning, Shino-kun," she spoke while disentangling herself from her backpack. She intended to leave it on one of the wooden stumps, and the process made her notice the oddly-shaped alarm clock resting atop the central stump.

She wondered if that was related to their training somehow.

"Hinata, are you unwell? You look downcast and tired. I noticed you spent some time by the gate before entering."

The girl winced. _'Do I look that bad…?'_

Shino was always straight to the point. While it was refreshing to know she'd never need small talk with him, it also had its drawbacks. Especially when his bugs made him aware of where she had been and for how long.

"I… I'm fine, Shino-kun," she mumbled, avoiding his gaze. "It's just… c-clan issues. Y-You know…"

Shino didn't reply immediately and just stared. It made Hinata have a sudden interest in the grass beneath her feet, feeling as if Shino was seeing right through her.

"…I understand clan matters can be taxing, but please don't overwork yourself."

An apology was already forming inside Hinata's throat, but Shino was faster.

He whipped out a book from his jacket's pocket, offering it to her. Seeing the familiar brown and red cover caused her to smile brightly, ignited by a spark of excitement.

"Ah! So you finished it already! What did you think?" she said, taking the book—one of her favorites—and turning to place it in her backpack.

The two spent the next few minutes discussing Hinata's book. It was a romance novel mixed with a fair deal of adventure, which turned out to be the more engaging aspect of the book in Shino's opinion given how much he focused on it.

He had noticed details she hadn't and Hinata felt excited about reading her book again with a new perspective, but one thing about his analysis bothered her.

"So, um," she began, "you didn't like the romance at all, Shino-kun? You didn't say a lot about that. I… I thought you said you were open to these things?" she said, dreading that she had made a mistake.

"I am, and I found it reasonable both in pacing and development."

"…But?"

"The romance led the characters to react far too recklessly in some parts, favoring emotion over logic when they shouldn't. Particularly, the infiltration of the count's citadel—which went horribly wrong— could've been avoided entirely had they waited for the army to arrive, or at least they could've waited until nightfall. And in general, the romance was… too sugary, I suppose you could say. It's not an objective flaw, but it affected my enjoyment of the story to a degree."

Hinata's brows furrowed slightly. In her opinion, that emotion, that recklessness Shino criticized made the characters more human and relatable, while all the "sugar" he spoke of had been _just perfect_ … but, she had to respect his views. It was a subjective matter after all.

"I… I see. Well, I'll try to keep what you said in mind next time I suggest something..."

He nodded. "It was nonetheless a high-quality story. I'd ask what you thought of my book now, but Kiba and Akamaru are approaching."

"Oh," she muttered, the small word betraying her disappointment. Not at Kiba; she had been looking forward to sharing with Shino her opinion about the book he had lent her, but alas…

It occurred to her that Kiba was late, probably by a fair margin if she had to guess from how much she and Shino had talked. _'Did something happen to him and Akamaru?'_

Soon enough, they heard a loud voice coming from the training ground's entrance.

"Hey! Don't start without us!"

From a distance, Hinata and Shino could see their missing teammate, who was dashing towards them alongside his little ninja dog, Akamaru.

He reached his teammates in only a few seconds, breathing heavily.

"Hi… guys… sorry for the wait," Kiba said, panting, and received a silent nod from Shino and a quiet "good morning" from Hinata in return.

The boy wore dark gray pants and a bulky fur jacket of the same color, with the fur on the edges of the sleeves and hood being a pure white instead. Said hood also covered his messy brown hair, but it didn't hide the red fang-shaped marks painted on his cheeks—the symbol of the Inuzuka clan.

The boy's slightly pronounced canines and slit-shaped pupils gave him a distinctive feral look that had greatly intimidated Hinata before she got to know him better and realized he was a carefree, funny person that could often make her day a little brighter with his jokes or words of encouragement when the situation called for it. Though he was a little too physical for her tastes, she felt as if Kiba was always looking out for her.

With that in mind, Hinata opened her mouth to ask him if he was alright but closed it again when she saw Kakashi leaving his tree.

"Well, well, look who's finally here," the jonin said, pocketing his book. "Kiba, was it? I'll have you know, I'm not fond of people who lack punctuality."

"Sorry Kakashi-sensei… I-I can explain though!"

In the midst of catching his breath, Kiba told them about how he would've arrived in time if not for a sandwich _dropping from the sky_ in the middle of the street and right in front of them. Akamaru, enticed by the food, had fled from his owner and almost managed to get the sandwich for himself… but a hungry street cat stole his would-be-breakfast right beneath his nose, resulting in him angrily chasing after the cat.

Obviously, Kiba had to chase his partner down as well, which consumed a lot of time according to him. The boy sent a pissed off glare at the pup as he spoke about that last part, but Akamaru never noticed. The light-furred dog was too busy sniffing around, until his nose finally led him to Hinata's backpack.

It broke the girl's heart when he turned to her with a pitiful whine, looking at her pleadingly.

"Sorry Akamaru-kun," she whispered, crouching to his level to rub his little head. "Hang in there, okay? I promise it will be worth the wait!"

Akamaru gave a small bark and his tail began to wag, making her giggle softly. _'So cute!'_

While she comforted Akamaru, Kiba was finishing his explanation and looked at Kakashi uneasily.

"—and he managed to eat the sandwich before I could catch him. Is… is it going to be bad for him? Kurenai-sensei said you wanted us not skip breakfast, so…"

"Maybe. I suppose it's alright for now," Kakashi answered evasively, shrugging as he inwardly added the Inuzuka's story to his 'lame and unbelievable excuses to give when I'm late' list.

He then sat on the grass.

"Alright. Now that all of you are here, I'd like to know you three a little better before our training. Tell me your name, likes, dislikes, hobbies, goals, dreams... you know, the usual."

The kids followed his lead and sat as well, but Kiba, who was sitting between his teammates, had an objection to Kakashi's proposal.

"My mom always tells me you gotta give your name before asking for other people's, so why dontcha go first, sensei?"

"Hmmm... fine. Fair enough."

In the end, his introduction boiled down to five words:

His name was Kakashi Hatake.

 _'Well, that was informative,'_ Hinata thought, feeling a mix of annoyance and worry at the man's attitude. It didn't bode well for them if he was this disinterested before the day even started.

Kakashi then motioned at Kiba for him to begin. The boy was glaring at the jonin for his shoddy introduction but dropped it in order to start his own.

"The name's Kiba Inuzuka," he declared, pointing at himself with his right thumb before using the same hand to pat his dog, who was lying on the ground right next to him. "And this little guy here is Akamaru, my ninken and partner."

Upon being called, Akamaru barked cutely at Kakashi, most likely saying "hi!" in dog speech. The puppy then jumped on his owner's lap, who, smirking, then carefully placed the dog atop of his head before continuing.

"I like my family, my friends, red meat in general, and shockingly enough... dogs! In particular Akamaru. Anyways, I really dislike cats, seafood, stuck-up jerks, those bastards from Iwa, and being bored. My dream is to be the strongest ninja of the Inuzuka clan, to protect our pack so that we never have to lose so many people like what happened in the previous war... and eventually being Hokage would be nice. My hobby is walking with Akamaru. And training, I guess," he finished with a shrug, looking nowhere as happy as when he began.

Kakashi wasn't very happy either. He remembered how the Inuzuka clan had suffered heavy casualties during the previous war, due to them being constantly needed at the frontlines to use their digging techniques to counter the defensive Earth techniques the Hidden Rock's ninja employed. He could understand somewhat how the young Inuzuka felt, having lost comrades to that same war and life in general.

 _'At least the kid's not devoting himself to revenge,'_ Kakashi thought, remembering his team's little avenger. _'I suppose it makes sense. He is too young to have suffered directly because of the war, so his feelings most likely come from being exposed to his family's hatred and loss.'_

He stopped for a moment to think of something to say to Kiba… something his old sensei might have said to make the boy feel better… but in the end Kakashi gave up.

Like he had always told the Hokage, he just wasn't fit for that kind of job.

He then looked at the other male genin, and taking the hint, Shino began speaking in his usual neutral tone.

"I am Shino Aburame. As a member of the Aburame clan, it's obvious that I have an interest in bugs, however, I also enjoy reading in general, learning about Konoha's history and fighting skilled opponents. My hobbies are to help my parents find and research new specimen for my clan. I dislike those who kill bugs without a logical reason to do so, plants in general, forgetful people and bright lights. My goal is to meet and exceed the expectations of my parents and clan as a ninja of Konoha. My dream… is to one day breed a new sub-species of bugs that are able to replicate the poisonous effects and antibodies of the Rinkaichu, a rare and highly dangerous kind of bug, for me to make use of them in combat and bring glory to my clan with them, as a homage to a long-lost friend."

Pushing back his sunglasses, Shino went silent, taking a moment to remember his old childhood friend, Torune Aburame.

Kakashi could empathize with him. Taking a glance at the memorial stone that rested further back, he remembered a long-lost friend of his own: Obito Uchiha. Like the Aburame boy, he too struggled to bring forth the full potential of his best friend's special ability and memento, in his case, Obito's Sharingan.

The small brief silence was enough to unnerve Kiba, who noticed Kakashi was lost in thought. Frowning as he realized that he'd have to take the lead, Kiba nudged Hinata's arm with his elbow.

"Your turn, Hinata."

"Ah! Yes...! Um... s-sorry," she muttered, mistaking herself as the source of Kiba's annoyance. Her gaze met Kakashi's, who nodded at her, and taking a quick but deep breath, she began.

"My name is Hinata Hyuuga." That was as far as she went before dropping the eye contact. "I… I like to spend my time t-taking care of my mother's garden, c-cooking, pressing flowers and reading. I dislike… m-many of my clan's traditions… and, my dreams… m-my dreams are… umm…?"

A lump in her throat made her stop. It only got worse when she noticed everyone's eyes were on her, which turned continuing into an impossibility and practically forced her head to hang low in a feeble attempt to avoid their curious gazes.

"Did you… forget your own dreams?" Kakashi asked after the silence stretched for too long, bewildered.

Before Hinata had a chance to reply—not that she _could've —_ Kiba began to laugh.

"C'mon Hinata," he patted the girl on the back, amused by how red she was. "Kakashi-sensei won't bite you, I promise!"

"If I recall correctly from our first day as a team," Shino began, drawing everyone's attention, "Hinata dreams of succeeding her father as the clan head, mainly in order to help unite the main and branch houses of her clan through the removal of the Caged Bird Seal."

"Sounds about right," Kiba said, his eyes falling on Hinata again. "I think you mentioned something about wanting to marry and have kids one day too, didn't you?"

The girl eventually answered with an affirmative noise that, if Kiba didn't have sensitive hearing, he might've missed.

 _'Not like any of that matters anymore,'_ she thought.

Kiba also didn't miss her unusually gloomy expression, one that he recognized from a few times where Hinata had done something clumsy and led them to fail a mission, or close enough.

It piqued his curiosity.

"Well," Kakashi shrugged, "if you two say so…"

Kakashi couldn't help but pity Hinata. One couldn't become a clan head without being considerably powerful for a jonin-level ninja, and the girl didn't seem to have the personality for the job. And if the little he knew about the Hyuuga clan's seal was true, she'd risk having her own kids sealed should she have some before dealing with that problem.

 _'Can't say I envy her,'_ he thought, getting up. "You seem like okay kids, maybe even a bit boring… but at least it looks like you three will be easier to handle than my own team," he confessed with a small sigh.

Kiba snickered at that. "Wouldn't be surprised if they are why his hair is so white," he whispered to Hinata, hoping for a reaction.

To his disappointment, it failed to sway her mood. She still looked as glum as before.

"I… I wonder how they are doing," she muttered, distractedly.

"Maybe you should start to worry more about yourself."

A ringing noise followed Kakashi's words, drawing Team 8's attention towards him. He had stood up and now held a pair of bells in his hand.

"I'm sure you guys have been told I was supposed to be teaching about ninjutsu to you, but… that's not the game we'll be playing today."

Confused, the three genin exchanged glances with each other while Kakashi tied the bells to his waistband.

"I have a simple test for you: get these bells from me. That's all."

From those words, Hinata immediately assumed that all she and her teammates would be something like hide-and-seek, as that sort of activity could truly test their abilities as a tracking squad.

…And then Kakashi told them that the only way to win was to come at him with the intent to kill, making her eyes become as big as saucers.

 _'Kurenai-sensei said he was strong enough to become Hokage if he wanted… how are we going to fight someone like that!?'_

"The hell!?" she heard Kiba grumbling as he sprung up. "But that's not fair at all! We're only genin, remember?"

"Of course, I will be restraining myself to give you a chance."

Hinata's shoulders sagged with a relieved sigh. The test no longer felt impossible—in hindsight, it was obvious he'd hold back.

But… why did she still have a bad feeling about this?

"What is the purpose of having only two bells and both in the same place?" Shino asked as he stood up, making Hinata realize she was the only one of them still on sitting on the grass.

Blushing, she quickly scrambled to get up.

"Oh, that…? Well," Kakashi began, "it's because each person can only get a single bell. Meaning that, at best, only two of you can pass."

The clear amusement in Kakashi's sole visible eye scared Hinata, but a question tumbled out of her mouth regardless. "A-And… what if we don't?"

"You will lose your headbands. And then you'll go back to the academy for another year until you can take the genin test again. I'd usually remove those who fail from Konoha's ninja program permanently, but you three are children of clan heads so I don't expect I will be able to go that far."

Those words, delivered so nonchalantly despite their weight, made Hinata as pale as a sheet.

 _'If that happens then… then our team will be disbanded!'_

Shaken by that thought, she then almost had a heart attack when Kiba swore as loud as a firecracker right by her ear.

"You can't do that to us!" he yelled, with Akamaru barking in support. "Kurenai-sensei would never let you!"

"Furthermore," Shino began, "we already were approved as genin by Kurenai-sensei after we graduated."

Kakashi regarded them with a raised eyebrow. "The Hokage himself agreed to these terms—it was a condition for me to be here in the first place. Like it or not," his voice took a harsh edge, "Kurenai can't do a thing about it. You are under _my_ command now."

Shino didn't react to the commanding tone Kakashi chose to use, but the rebuttal rendered Kiba speechless. Perhaps sensing that his owner needed a bit of comforting, Akamaru leaped to him, and Kiba hugged the dog close to his chest.

 _'If only Naruto was this easy to shut down,'_ Kakashi thought. He then pointed to somewhere behind Team 8, making the genin turn.

"That alarm on that stump is set to 10:30 a.m. That's your deadline... so this means you guys have about 3 hours to get the bells from me. And one last thing, about lunch. Kurenai said you'd bring food with you, right Hinata?"

The girl started once she felt Kakashi's eye on her. "O-Oh, yes… um, I-I made bentos... t-they're in my bag."

"Excellent… in addition to what I just said, whoever fails my test will be strapped to those stumps while the others will have lunch right here, in this clearing. If all of you fail, then that'd be just me, my team, and Kurenai having lunch today. Any questions?"

"You're crazy…" Kiba growled, his voice dripping with disgust.

He didn't know, but that was an echo of Hinata's thoughts. The idea that her own food was going to be used as a _torture device_ was a bitter pill to swallow and made girl's stomach twist.

"So," Kakashi continued, "the test will begin in a few seconds. Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

Three clones suddenly popped in front of Kakashi.

Before the trio could even realize what was going on, the chakra constructs lunged at them at a speed that was not at all restrained. With each clone having one of the genin in their arms, they used a Body Flicker, leaving only a trail of leaves where they previously stood.

"Oh well."

Now alone, Kakashi didn't bother to keep his thoughts to himself as he resumed his reading of the Toad Sage's masterpiece: Icha Icha Paradise, volume 4.

"Let's see if your kids are all that you said they are, Kurenai."

Eventually, the residual chakra from his dispelled clones returned to him, each from a different corner of the training grounds, and each carrying a different memory.

"And now, I only have to wait for the fun part..."

* * *

Disoriented by the suddenness of it all, Hinata struggled to balance herself after Kakashi's clone released her and barely managed to avoid falling on the grass.

"This is your last chance to ask me anything," the clone spoke up, watching as the girl scanned the little wooded area around them in a mix of confusion and nervousness.

Hinata was not one to question people, especially her superiors. But when she turned to face him, her next words stumbled out of her mouth before she could stop them.

"W-Why are you doing this to us…!?"

The clone's only reaction to her distress was to raise an eyebrow. "If that was all, remember: if you can't get a bell, you're out."

He then poofed out of existence, leaving his threat to echo inside Hinata's head.

In that situation, any normal person would start to worry about their own hide, and Hinata… was no different.

For one brief moment, she feared for what would happen to her if she was stripped of her headband and demoted from her position as a genin.

The consequences of failing were clear to Hinata.

 _"_ _You and your sister will duel once again. If you lose, your title of heiress will be forfeit and your responsibilities toward the clan will change accordingly with your position in the line of succession."_

...Hinata knew she _would_ lose that duel. That wasn't even up to debate. But if, before that, she returned home with the news that she was being sent back to the academy… she also knew her father wouldn't allow that to happen.

He definitively was influential enough that he could reverse Kakashi's decision if he wanted to… but this would just become the last straw for him.

He'd transfer her title to Hanabi on the spot. There would be no point in the duel.

And there would be no second chances, for Hinata was certain he'd also remove her from the ninja program entirely. Losing her headband would be the decisive proof that investing in her future as a kunoichi was a futile endeavor, and the money the clan would waste with yet another year of her being in the academy could be more useful elsewhere.

Unlike the heiress, the clan head's other children were not obligated to become warriors for their entire lives. The clan always pushed for that, for safety reasons, but these children had a different primary duty: to marry with an important person from outside the clan and help spread the Hyuuga clan's influence around the world… through a marriage contract if necessary.

Hinata felt a tight knot in her throat and cursed herself for being such a naïve _moron_ and believing that her childish plan would work.

Her idea had been simple in concept. It relied on how, heiress or not, she and her sister would only be allowed to marry after they turned eighteen. The difference between them in that regard was the freedom of choice, which only the heir would have. Hanabi would be married off as soon as possible, and Hinata wanted to avoid that. She wanted her sister to be able to take the reins of her own future, but how could she help her?

That's where the plan came in. If Hinata could become the clan head and execute the changes the clan _needed_ to go through before Hanabi came of age, then Hinata could simply abdicate the position and allow her sister—the one more suited for the job—to take over before anyone forced her to marry for the sake of the clan. This would let Hanabi choose her husband freely and even stay as the clan head if she so desired.

Hinata also had some thoughts about how to avoid being married off to someone afterwards but… they didn't matter.

She should've known that the clan wouldn't stand for a weak heiress, and that she wouldn't become stronger fast enough to avoid her fate.

Her dream future was now out of reach, and failing Kakashi's test would barely change anything in her life. Except… for one thing.

Team 8 would never be the same again.

She didn't want to cut ties with them. Kurenai was like a mother to her, while Kiba and Shino were her first real friends. She had a taste of what friendship meant through Hanabi and the branch house members she interacted with most often such as the kitchen staff, but those bonds were too different.

There was no "clan" ruling over her dynamics with her team… at least, not until that moment.

Hiashi's words had caused her so much inner turmoil, but now, even if momentarily, they brought Hinata some peace. Those words allowed her to take a deep breath, forget herself, and focus on what was truly important to her at that moment:

Her teammates.

After hearing them both re-state their dreams and goals in front of Kakashi, and adding that with all that she had learned about them ever since Team 8 was formed, Hinata realized that even if she didn't have much to lose here… Kiba and Shino _definitively_ had.

She wasn't sure if Kiba's relationship with his mom was as bad as his constant whining about her "nagging" suggested, but what she did know was that Tsume Inuzuka wasn't above physically disciplining her children when they stepped out of line. Kiba had commented that he always had gone to sleep sore and bruised whenever he had caused problems in the academy or had gotten bad scores in tests… Hinata didn't want to imagine how badly he'd be beaten if he came home bearing news of his demotion.

What would actually be worse for him was how the Inuzuka clan handled the process of teaching their special techniques. One had to prove themselves worthy to the clan's loose equivalent of the Hyuuga's council, and Hinata was sure that being forced to re-do an entire year at the academy would bring a stigma that could take years for Kiba to free himself from, especially with how shaky his performance at the academy had been.

It would not only put his dream in jeopardy, but it could even lead to his death if he entered a fight that he would've otherwise won if not for his clan denying his right to improve himself.

Shino, on the other hand, had excelled at the academy and could've been their year's top student if not for his taijutsu being mediocre compared to one Sasuke Uchiha. Regardless, his consistently high performance made him notorious among his clansmen, and with that came the expectation that he'd continue to show such promising results throughout his career.

Hinata was sure that the constant pressure she felt to meet her clan's expectations was just as heavy for Shino, if not heavier because he kept up with them. Despite his stoicism, Hinata could feel that he was proud of his accomplishments, of how his clan held him in high esteem and believed he could achieve greatness.

To have so many years of hard work spent on building that trust shattered in a single blow…

Shino didn't let his emotions show but that didn't mean he was a machine. His clan's logic-driven mindset led him to suppress his emotions—that's the impression Hinata had anyway—but a balloon could only hold so much air before bursting. Unlike with Kiba and even herself, Hinata was nowhere as sure in Shino's ability to bounce back from the shame of being deemed a failure by everyone, given how drastic the paradigm shift would be for him… and it scared her.

But still...

 _'Maybe I'm overthinking this…?'_

Hinata knew she couldn't predict the future. Perhaps she was underestimating her friends or misunderstanding their situations, but the only thing she had to guide her path…

 _"From this day forward, I'll be handling your training myself."_

…Were her own memories.

Day gave into night, the forest turned into walls, the infinite blue sky above her became a square of darkness that loomed outside a window.

Suddenly, she was back inside her home's dojo, facing her father. The anger in his glare was so strong she was forced to look down, making her notice her clothes had changed to what she usually wore when training indoors.

 _"Your cousin Neji has recently graduated the academy as the best of his class. Our clansmen have been talking about his talents, but I hear no such praises for you, Hinata. On the contrary! When they talk about you, it's only to praise your sister for defeating you in spars. As my heiress and future leader of this clan, I cannot and will not accept the mediocre results you have shown so far! Is that understood?"_

She almost managed to stutter an affirmative, but the lights above going off distracted her, drowning the room in pure darkness until a nearby door slid open. Her neck turned in that direction, allowing her to see the courtyard, bathed in sunlight, as well as the disappearing figure of her grandfather.

One second later and she felt a hammer smashing into her torso, flooding her system with pain and sending her to crash on the dojo's floor. Her father loomed over her with an outstretched palm hovering where she had been.

 _"Do you see, Hinata? Your grandfather was so disgusted by how weak you are that he couldn't even stay and watch your training until the end! He doesn't think you are worth paying attention to… and after these past few weeks, I'm starting to agree with him. Now get up! Prove me wrong!"_

Though her entire being was begging her to ignore that order, she knew she couldn't. Her body was aching all over, and Hinata struggled to rise… but her wobbling legs failed her.

A chair cushioned her fall. Stars shone in the black sky beyond the window behind her father, who sat in a chair across from her. The desk that now separated them—it was his office's, she realized—did little to make her feel shielded from him, even though Hiashi's eyes no longer burned her with his anger.

The raw disappointment they conveyed froze her soul.

 _"It has been months, Hinata. Your sister has been improving by the day, but you? You are just as weak, slow, clumsy and predictable as when we began. I've had enough of your failures. I'll be requesting a private audience with Hokage-sama tomorrow; your training from now own will be handled by whatever jonin he has available. I have better things to do with my day than dealing with you."_

The way he simply went back to his paperwork, not even bothering with a direct dismissal… somehow, it hurt her more than his words.

Her feet slowly took her out of the room, but the moment she was out Hiashi's sight she broke into a run. Hallways upon hallways blurred all around her, until she was inside the dojo again, and then out in the dark courtyard.

Hinata could barely see the majestic moon that shone among the stars because of the unshed tears pooling in her eyes. She wiped them on her sleeve with a single motion, clearing her vision just in time for her to witness the moon exploding into light and fire, blinding her.

When sight next returned to her, the sun was already dominating the skies above. But she was still in the courtyard.

 _"Is this truly alright with you? Hinata is from your clan's main branch."_

She blinked, confused at the voice that came from behind her, from within the dojo.

"Is that… Kurenai-sensei?"

 _"I can ensure she will graduate if I teach her, but I'm not a Hyuuga. I can't help your daughter refine her unique abilities. Even for a genin there's always the risk of death... she is your heiress, isn't she?"_

She gasped.

"No… no!"

She _knew_ what memory this was.

 _"Hmph. I don't care what you'll teach her as long as it's enough for her to graduate."_

Her knees betrayed her. "N-Not this!"

 _"All these years that useless girl has only been wasting my time."_

She closed her eyes shut and her hands flew to cover her ears, but her attempts at protecting herself were futile. Hiashi's words pierced through the darkness, shattering her every defense.

 _"The Hyuuga clan doesn't need a failure like her staining our reputation."_

"Please, s-stop…!"

 _"She wasn't even able to surpass her sister who is five years younger than her. It's pathetic!"_

 _"You mean, this girl?"_ Kurenai asked in a strained tone.

 _"Yes… get up, Hanabi!"_

The reminder that her sister had been training with her father that day did nothing to soothe Hinata's pain. The little girl had been so full of bruises that night, and Hinata knew she was to blame… almost as if her own hands had caused those ugly, purple marks that littered her sister's body.

 _"She is my hope for the future of this clan. As you can see, I cannot waste my time with Hinata any longer when my other daughter has shown so much potential."_

"Stop…!"

 _"Now answer me. Are you going to accept this job or not?"_

 _"…I will. Your daughter will be in good hands."_

 _"Very well, Hokage-sama will inform you of the next steps. Now leave us! You're being as much of an inconvenience as Hinata herself."_

"…"

"…"

"…"

…The memory ended. It was only natural, since Hinata remembered she had waited by the dojo's door for hours so she could tend to Hanabi's bruises once they were done training. There was nothing worth remembering before that.

Now, the only sound Hinata could hear was of her own labored gasps for air. Though terrified of what she'd find next, she dared to open her eyes.

She was finally back on Training Ground 3.

This brought her relief, yet her heart still ached, beating painfully, loudly, with the reminder that in her father's eyes, she was a failure. A waste of time. Useless. An inconvenience.

That we was ashamed of her.

That he didn't love her.

That if she died, he wouldn't care—he'd probably be glad to be rid of her.

And Hinata was glad to be reminded of those memories, however painful.

Unlike when they were twisted into the nightmares that she occasionally found herself trapped in, now they only served to strengthen her resolve.

 _'I can't let this happen to them,'_ she thought, sniffing uncontrollably _. 'Kiba-kun and Shino-kun don't deserve this… this pain…'_

It didn't matter that she couldn't know for sure how their families would react if they failed. If there was a risk, no matter how small, that they'd go through something even remotely similar to what she had lived…

She _refused_ to let that happen.

Nodding to herself, she began to think. She had a goal, but she needed a plan.

 _'I was never any good at strategy,'_ she lamented to herself.

That particular failure didn't sting much. She had always been comfortable in following someone else's lead, and Team 8 did nothing to change that habit in Hinata. Kurenai tended to give them broad orders, but if deeper planning was ever required, Hinata could always count on a certain someone.

 _'If only Shino-kun were here to help me…'_

"Hinata?"

She had never regretted a stray thought so fast.

The sounds of someone walking through a bush came from her left, and as much as she didn't want to, pure instinct made her turn towards him.

"Shi… Shino-kun?" she said, speech impaired not by a stutter, but by more sniffles. "W-What are y-you doing… here?"

"…I was unsure whether to approach you or not, but whatever was happening seems to be over. The question is, what happened?"

"N… n-nothing happened," she whispered, head hung low.

"…I would appreciate if you didn't reciprocate my concern with obvious lies. Hinata, you're still crying. And before, you were…"

Shino trailed into silence, filling her heart with dread. Her hand flew up to her face and she discovered that, yes, her tears had been real.

He must have heard her voice as well…

Sniffing, Hinata hastily dried her face and gathered all her willpower, forcing herself to face Shino and the shame of being seen in such a deplorable state.

"I… I-I'm okay n-now. R-Really…"

It sounded horribly unconvincing even to her own ears.

"What happened… w-was j-just a genjutsu so... could you… please, c-can you f-forget about this?"

Shino didn't respond. Hinata's eyes landed on the grass again.

She was lying, and she was sure he knew it. Shino would have considered that possibility immediately given the scene he stumbled upon, but the bug he had sent to live with her would have told him her chakra network was untainted… and that fact was the likely source of his uncharacteristic hesitation.

The way the silence stretched reminded Hinata of their first real interactions, when that had put her on the edge. It was jarring to return to that starting point now.

"I won't forget this," Shino eventually said, "but… I will trust your judgment and end this conversation here."

Though not what she desired, the compromise—the avoided confrontation—flooded Hinata with relief. It shone through in the grateful smile she gave to Shino then, but it wasn't enough to get rid of the weariness in her expression.

It made Shino's frown deepen slightly from behind his sunglasses. Letting go was a hard, frustrating decision for him to make, but he knew he was ill-equipped to help Hinata on his own and especially with so little context to work with. He wasn't good at dealing with people, but he could see that pressing Hinata without having a fair idea of what was her problem would only backfire.

Thus, he decided to wait and watch out for new developments and clues before making any moves such as talking with Kiba or Kurenai. Instead, he contented himself with helping Hinata up by offering his hand, which she took immediately.

They had something more important to worry about regardless.

"About your question;" Shino began, "I decided to seek you out because I wanted to discuss this test that Kakashi-sensei proposed. I have a theory, but I want to hear your thoughts on the matter first."

"My thoughts…?"

Right then, Hinata realized that she had barely pondered about the challenge surrounding the test yet. Her face scrunched up in confusion as she tried to think of something meaningful to say and… luckily, something quickly came to mind: the test's most obvious aspect.

It only confused her more.

"Shino-kun, I… I don't mean to be rude, but isn't this test a competition? N-Not that I wouldn't help you!" she blurted out in a high pitched-tone, making him raise an eyebrow, "but… w-well, I don't understand why you're here."

"I see."

Instead of giving her explanations, Shino walked a short distance away from Hinata and picked up a thin branch that was lying on the grass. With it, he began to scribble something on the ground.

"As you know, I have sent a bug to live with you and Kiba. They allow me to track your position relative to each other and myself, and this is the result I found when I tried to do that after the clone released me."

Her curiosity sparked, Hinata followed and peered over his shoulder to stare at the figure he had drawn, one shaped like the letter Y.

"We started beside each other, with Kiba in the opposite direction. This becomes a "Y" formation when accounting for Kakashi-sensei, who is on the central point. I should note that Kiba was positioned much farther away from Kakashi than us, more than twice as far."

"Huh? How weird… c-could it be because Kiba-kun is faster than us when he uses his techniques?"

"I considered that as well. Could you activate your Byakugan for a moment?

Humming in agreement, Hinata started to weave a sequence of hand signs she knew by heart until her world transformed, and all the colors that once surrounded her yielded to black. The small but bright blue of hers and Shino's chakra systems shone in that darkness, easily standing out.

Shino pointed in a certain direction. "I imagine Kakashi-sensei is too far for you to detect, but he is over there. What can you see?"

"O-Oh my… there are traps everywhere!"

Disguised pitfalls, wired contraptions tied to shuriken or thick logs, hidden flash bombs… there were traps of all sizes and shapes standing right in front of Hinata. Some were even layered on top of each other, weaved in a way where dodging the first trap would trigger the second, and others even had bells lying around as bait.

"Although my scouting abilities in this scenario are inferior to yours, I found many similar arrangements of traps obstructing the woods ahead. I believe that the entire area around Kakashi-sensei is like this, as my bugs continued to detect traps in that direction while I headed here. I strongly suspect it will be impossible to approach him from any point without having to deal with traps."

A light bulb lit up above Hinata's head. "He's testing our tracking abilities, isn't he?"

"Indeed. If we aren't able to properly navigate around these traps, then we won't even have the chance to acquire a bell."

 _'Well, that explains the time limit being so generous.'_ It made sense to Hinata, considering Team 8's purpose.

"Hinata, what is your opinion of this test now?

Deactivating her Byakugan to conserve chakra, she turned to him and replayed their discussion in her mind. It made her frown. "It's almost like we are meant to reach Kakashi-sensei much sooner than Kiba-kun. Isn't that unfair?"

"That's what I thought as well. I cannot be certain without knowing what traps are ahead of Kiba, but I do know his tracking abilities are not particularly suited for detecting and avoiding most kinds of traps, unlike ours."

"Yes, but… what does this mean?"

Shino readjusted his sunglasses. "I believe this test is meant to appear competitive, but in truth, it's a cooperative test. Tell me, have you ever heard of ninja teams with less than three members?"

"Uh... no." It crossed Hinata's mind in that moment, however, that even in the academy they were almost always split into trios for group activities.

"Exactly. This becomes even more significant for a squad like ours. If you think about each of our tracking abilities, they complement each other extremely well but only with all of them available at once."

"Then… do you think we should take this test as a team instead?"

"Indeed. I believe Kiba was delayed because of how he would already need to cooperate with Akamaru to succeed. That, perhaps, would make the true objective too obvious."

Hinata began to fidget. Shino's logic was sound and compelling, but… it relied too heavily on the premise that Kakashi had lied to them. Weren't they supposed to trust in their sensei?

"Are you confident about this, Shino-kun…?"

"To be honest, no," he admitted, to Hinata's surprise. "I'm aware my theory revolves around many assumptions. However, I am certain none of us would be able to get a bell from a jonin like Kakashi-sensei on their own, even if he were to hold back."

A small gasp escaped the girl's lips. "But if we worked together, maybe…!"

"Ah, so you see the possibility as well. Then, will you work with me? I might need help to get my point across to Kiba."

Hinata began to think, but soon shook her head at her foolishness—hadn't she made a choice already?

"Let's go find Kiba-kun, then!" she said, giving him the best smile she was able to muster.

"Thank you. However, first, we need to get through those traps. I'm sure at least those near us have been made with your Byakugan in mind, so let's proceed carefully while my bugs scout the way ahead."

Nodding, Hinata reactivated her eyes and the pair left the small clearing, intent on circling around Kakashi's "territory" until they found a good angle to approach Kiba from.

That is, until they were forced to change their plan…

* * *

"That was surprising, but also underwhelming." Kakashi flipped a page from his book. "For the record, I'm not talking about what I'm reading."

Kiba growled in response. It wasn't like the boy could do much else with his body almost completely buried, with only his head above the ground.

His partner, Akamaru, hadn't fared much better. He had tried to duel Kakashi even after Kiba was out of the fight, but the jonin quickly sent the dog back to his master with a kick to the gut. And to Kiba's misfortune, that resulted in Akamaru vomiting right by his face… and he couldn't even turn his head away from that mess.

 _'What a great day to have a sensitive nose,'_ Kiba grumbled in his mind, eying Akamaru's vomit with disgust and anger. _'I swear, if I ever get my hands on whoever dropped that stupid sandwich…!'_

"And that," Kakashi continued, motioning towards the dog with his chin, "is the kind of thing that happens to those that don't follow the rules."

Kiba began to growl louder, watching helplessly as Akamaru tried to get up but failed due to the debilitating pain and the lack of air in his little lungs. No matter how much the boy tried to struggle, to do _something_ for his partner, his limbs were completely immobilized underground. "Dammit…!"

"It'll be a while until your dog is up for digging you out of there, so, let me give you a thing to think about while you wait," Kakashi said, maintaining that same bored tone in his voice that only made Kiba angrier. "You might have some speed with either the Passing Fang or the Four Legs Technique active, sure, but that doesn't do you any good on an empty clearing. Your fighting style is too linear for someone at my level—too predictable. Find some cover and maybe you'll get better results."

"Whatever."

Kakashi flipped another page. "Then again, you knew that already, didn't you? It's for that exact purpose that your clan uses special smoke balls to ambush their foes, and you didn't. You also never aimed for the bells… and that bothers me," he admitted.

"Lucky you," Kiba muttered. "There's a _lot_ of things bothering me right now and almost all of them are your fault one way or another."

Hearing that little rant made Kakashi shake his head. "So you just wanted to fight? How disappointing. You're definitively going back to the academy at this rate. Unless you want to break that kind of news to your mother, maybe you should try to get a bell next time."

"K-Keep them," the boy shot back. His blood froze at the thought of breaking that kind of news to his mother, leading to that stutter, but he didn't let that stop him from smirking smugly at Kakashi. "Who cares about your stupid bells anyway?"

The boy's overconfident tone made Kakashi's eye land on him. "…What makes you say that?"

"If we beat you then there's no way you'll fail us, so screw those bells!"

 _'…So close, and yet so far.'_ Kakashi sighed from behind his mask. "Even if what you think is true, you and Akamaru aren't beating me anytime soon."

Somehow, Kiba's grin only grew at the taunt.

"Me and Akamaru? Yeah, probably not."

It made Kakashi raise an eyebrow. However, as he noticed in that moment that Akamaru was starting to recover, he stopped himself from sating his curiosity again.

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I must be going."

"Wait, what?"

"You didn't think I was going to stay here all day long, right? That'd just be too easy," Kakashi said light-heartedly, going back to his book. "Each time one of you tries and fails to get the bells, I'll change location. If either of your friends gets here before Akamaru digs you out, feel free to tell them that if you want."

"That won't be necessary."

Calmly, Kakashi turned around to see the two missing members of Team 8 walking out of the woods. He felt Shino's eyes trained on him despite the sunglasses…but Hinata, who oddly enough was cradling a small log in her arms, was looking at something else entirely. Her face did nothing to hide her worry, and neither did her voice.

"Kiba-kun, Akamaru-kun! A-Are you alright…?"

"Don't worry, we're fine! Listen, forget about the bells, we just—!"

"Interesting," Kakashi interrupted, closing his book. He realized two things in that moment: that Kiba's use of "we" earlier referred to Team 8 and not just him and Akamaru… and, that the two newcomers came from the direction his clone had taken Hinata to.

He decided to stir the pot a bit more.

"That was a smart move, Shino, to team up with Hinata to take the bells from me. Her abilities do complement yours much better than Kiba's after all… it would be much more convenient to have Kiba be the one who fails, right?"

Even though his words made Kiba gasp and Hinata's expression shift from worry to panic—did Shino fool her? Was Kiba thinking _she_ hadbetrayed him?—the Aburame didn't take the bait and continued to stare him down.

"...So my suspicions were correct. This test was carefully constructed to pit us against each other, but the objective is to have _all_ of us working together to retrieve the bells. You are only trying to fool us. Isn't that right?"

"…"

Kakashi didn't answer the question.

The growing tension in Training Ground 3 made Hinata's heart fill with dread as it began to beat faster and faster. It didn't help that she noticed the corner of Kakashi eye turning up, almost as if he was smiling… as if they had been caught in his trap.

Her anxiety overcame her shyness. "A-Are we… w-wrong?"

"…I gave all the instructions you truly needed at the very beginning. If that's what you think, sure, go for it," Kakashi shrugged. "It's not my headband on the line anyway. Just remember that you don't have all day," he pointed at the nearby wooden posts, or more specifically, the clock atop one of them.

One second later, while the genin were looking away, he vanished in a pile of leaves.

She clutched the log closer to her chest. _'Could it be that we really were mistaken…?'_

"Hinata, we need to assist Kiba," Shino told her, dispelling her thoughts.

"Oh, r-right!"

The two hurried towards their trapped teammate. Akamaru had already recovered and was busily trying to unbury his master's arms, and said master was cursing Kakashi under his breath, only stopping when his friends got close enough.

"What's up with that log, Hinata?"

It was Shino who answered instead, as the two crouched to help Akamaru. "Once you can move your arms, you can use a Substitution with this log to escape. We had a more elaborate plan involving this, but it ended up being unnecessary since Kakashi-sensei left and won't be here to hinder us."

Kiba whistled. "Nice thinking."

Soon enough, the Inuzuka was free to stretch his limbs and walk once again. "Man, that sucked! Thanks, guys," he beamed at his teammates.

Hinata smiled right back. "I'm glad you're okay Kiba-kun. And, um… I-I was wondering, why were you buried like that?"

"Eh," he shrugged, "I got caught by an Earth technique. Headhunter Jutsu, or something like that."

Shino scowled at that. "Kiba, he is a jonin. You couldn't possibly defeat him by yourself even if he held back. Why did you engage him alone?"

Kiba crossed his arms. "I wasn't alone, I had Akamaru with me."

The little dog barked in agreement by Kiba's feet, but Shino was unfazed. "That doesn't invalidate my point. This was reckless; you should have waited for us."

The accusation made Kiba scowl as well. "Look, I'm not dumb, okay? I was just trying to get a feel for his fighting style and such before you guys got here. I could tell you two weren't close by when I reached him," he explained, tapping his nose.

"Still—"

"Shino-kun, p-please," Hinata moved between the two boys. "N-Nothing happened to Kiba-kun… so isn't this okay?"

"…I suppose," he relented. "Nonetheless, I'm curious about how you reached him faster than us when my bugs told me you started out much farther from Kakashi than us. Didn't you have to deal with traps as well?"

"Hah, the traps?" Kiba smirked, his mood reversing completely. "I noticed some trees were rigged and such, so I avoided them all easily by going underground! It cost a fair bit of chakra but saved me a lot of trouble. Fair trade, I'd say."

"We reunited sooner than we would be able to otherwise, so I agree with you," Shino nodded. "There are still a few hours on the clock before our time is up, so let's use this opportunity to plan for the battle ahead."

Team 8 spent the next few minutes on the grass, discussing Kiba's findings and making theories and strategies.

Or that's what Hinata would have liked to say. In truth, she barely contributed to the discussion beyond keeping her Byakugan active just in case Kakashi decided to ambush them.

It only made everything more obvious to her.

 _'I'm really the weakest link here… Kakashi-sensei was completely wrong. Maybe my eyes have some value, but Shino-kun and Kiba-kun would be better off with each other than just with me. They are already smarter and stronger anyways…'_

"Hey, Hinata!"

Somehow, she managed to stop a shriek from escaping her mouth, but the surprise was enough that she completely dropped her Byakugan.

Her vision normalizing, she saw Kiba staring at her with concerned eyes.

"What's wrong with you today? You're looking so down… did something happen?"

"Clan issues, perhaps?" Shino prodded.

Hinata was unable to look at them.

"You know," Kiba continued, his tone softening, "if something's bothering you, you can talk to us. Maybe we can help, but if we don't at least you can get it off your chest or something…? Friends are for that kind of stuff!"

Hinata smiled, touched by Kiba's offer. She wanted to thank him, but knowing he expected an answer made her too nervous to say anything coherent.

Her brain worked hard to find an acceptable excuse, but… to her surprise, her eyes were what found her way out.

"It's just… I'm k-kinda hungry…"

Understanding flashed across Kiba's face and he glanced at Hinata's backpack that was in the post beside the clock. "Oh, that's right! You made our lunch today again, didn't you? And on an empty stomach, even… ouch."

She nodded. It wasn't a lie, her stomach _was_ bothering her. But… they didn't need to know there were more pressing matters on her mind.

Right?

"And about that," Kiba continued, "I wanted to thank you for doing that for us today, Hinata."

The confusion on her face must have been obvious, as he quickly elaborated.

"You see, I tried to track down Kakashi-sensei's smell earlier but it's all over this place! And for some reason this place also smells like dogs too… so I had no idea where to go until I smelled your food, and that's how I got here. So thanks, hehe!"

That precious, rare sensation of being useful to someone else warmed Hinata's heart enough that she giggled in response. "I'm glad I could help you, Kiba-kun."

"And I gotta say, what a smell!" Kiba licked his lips, a dreamy expression on his face. "Really looking forward to lunch today…"

"While I admit that I'm also feeling the effects of not having breakfast," Shino spoke up, "I will remind you both that we will not eat anything unless we pass this test."

"Ugh," Kiba groaned. "That's just stupid… but yeah, back to work. What were you saying anyways, man?"

"I wanted to know for how long your smoke balls last and how many you have. They will be key for our strategies to work."

"Sure, let's see…"

As Kiba stopped to think, Hinata's mind once again began to wander.

Even though Kiba had quickly agreed with Shino once they explained everything to him, Hinata couldn't help but doubt it all. _'Why would Kakashi-sensei insist on this lie? What if we are wrong and the test really is a competition… or maybe something else entirely?'_

It frustrated her, because no other option came to mind and she always returned to the same theory that they should've been taking Kakashi's words at face value. She could've brought it up to Shino and Kiba, sure, but she lacked the courage… she had a feeling they'd think her silly and ignore her, or even scold her. Or something. Whatever it was, she couldn't see a positive reaction to her words, assuming she actually managed to convey her fears properly.

And so Hinata kept quiet and tried to clear her head to focus on their little strategy meeting.

There wasn't much else she could do but cooperate with them. If Shino was right, then she just had to follow their plan and everything would work out… but if he was wrong…

 _'I'll need to keep an eye for a chance to create an opening for them…'_

She couldn't risk their futures by assuming Shino was correct. She couldn't let them become a failure like herself. If it would cost her headband to ensure they would avoid that fate…

Hinata knew it was a price worth paying. She had already sacrificed far more for someone else before, and compared to that…?

This would be nothing.

* * *

A/N:

I believe my decision to leave the fight to the next chapter is now justified, no?

My big goal here was to show the bonds between Hinata and her teammates. They care about her, yes… but it's not that deep yet, since they haven't been together for long. Still, Hinata's loneliness and selflessness ended up joining forces in this situation and lead to some rather unhealthy decision-making on her part. This is fully intentional.

The other big goal was to provide more Hyuuga family backstory and more of what made Hinata the person she is right now. There's a huge dissonance between how Hiashi is portrayed in his scenes and elsewhere in the story so far… their relationship is full of complex nuances. For now, this was just a taste of what's to come. I'm sure it has left many of you confused about what's _wrong_ with Hiashi (and why Hinata didn't think she would be sealed), but you'll have to wait until Hinata's return from the Land of Waves for more on that. This includes the reason I made the scene between Kurenai and Hiashi so much heavier than the canon version—though I can say the part that surely affected Hinata the most is unchanged, which is Hiashi's core reaction to the possibility of Hinata being killed.

I guarantee it will be worth the wait! Chapter 20 is a chapter I'm extremely proud of! But for something that isn't so far away… Next up, Kakashi's fight with Team 8! Just like Hiashi was a guest for this chapter, there's a special someone making an unexpected appearance next time, but in Kurenai/Team 7's side of the day instead, which is the chapter's second half. Look forward to it!

Lastly, huge thanks to _**DryBonesKing**_ , author of the wonderful and amazing naruhina fic **"True Potential"** , for letting me borrow a small plot point for this chapter and for an arc way later on...

Well, that's it! Please, don't forget to share your thoughts with me…! Reviews are important, even for old chapters!

* * *

Changelog:

v1.0.1 (11/16/2015)

Fixed one awkward sentence. Thank _gio08_ for warning me of it.

v2.0 (07/06/2016)

Fixed a few details, but mostly spent a huge time dealing with formatting and punctuation. There were too many for me not to make this a 2.0 version.

v3.0 (02/09/2018)

Many structural changes to better connect Hiashi and Hinata to their C19/20 selves and to actually have working Team 8 dynamics before we go forward.

Hiashi's scene now gives his side of his interaction with Hinata before he moves on to his office. His worries and his complex feelings regarding Hinata and his duties as a parent are introduced correctly now. He is still trying to find a way out for Hinata at this point, too… the scene was completely rewritten, basically, and is much bigger.

The Team 8 scene was fully rewritten as well, up until Kiba's arrival. It begins with Hinata having a little solo moment outside the training grounds before she goes in. Her scene with Shino actually exists instead of her retracting into her shell because she, somehow, recognized Kakashi's porn (I had an explanation for that but…), and we can see that there's a bond between the two. Kiba… doesn't have much more screentime than before so there was little to be done with him, but I believe he also comes across as someone Hinata already has a bond with at this point. Also, I expanded on some details and vagueness surrounding Kakashi's test, made Kakashi more apathetic and the reader sees far less of his inner thoughts and feelings.

Hinata's "stakes" have been modified to match later chapters as well, particularly regarding Hanabi. I also made a "flashback" of sorts that gives insight on more of her past and gives weight to her decisions now, and purposefully puts Hiashi's into question after his scene. The confrontation with Shino changed so he doesn't press her too much and Hinata doesn't reveal her thoughts—which is more in character to them. The small Shino scene from before this one was excluded and incorporated during his chat with Hinata, with extra details to Kakashi's test to make everything more logical from a "time spent" standpoint.

In contrast with the first scene, Kiba's scene with Kakashi was severely shortened with many superfluous, useless, anti-tension or awkwardly placed exposition bits removed. The part with the team united, however, was expanded for the most part, though certain details were also removed it was in exchange for a better focus on Hinata's state of mind and a bit of showcasing of Kiba's bond with her.


	4. Chapter 4 - Genin X Former ANBU Captains

Yo, everyone! Time for some action!

In this chapter, we will see the "fight" between Kakashi and Team 8... oh, we will also see the very end of Team 7's training, too. But out of the 14000 words of this chapter, roughly 9000 are devoted to action, so look forward to that!

Team 7's bit of this chapter will open with the last genjutsu Kurenai wanted to use to make Kakashi's genin learn and practice how to deal with illusions that affected all three of them. So the whole "Sasuke and Sakura practice genjutsu on Naruto" thing won't be covered, just mentioned.

By the way, those were 100% harmless illusions... I guess I should've said something to that effect before, since some reviewers seemed worried about that part. I had not imagined the tree jutsu would have made such a strong impression, but eh. Future readers won't have the chance to make that mistake since the A/Ns of chapter 2 will be altered.

Also, I know some of you might be wanting more action... But this arc will have only one more fight scene outside of this chapter (ending of chapter 6), and the Wave arc has fight scenes in 4 of the 8-ish chapters that the arc ended up having. I hope that's enough for you guys before the action really gets going afterwards as the Chunin Exams arc begins, but much like this prologue arc, I'm using Wave to setup character development, friendships (more on that later) and new abilities too.

And... just a reminder that this the first time I've written (and posted) an action sequence. Since I'm sure the action that people care the most for happens in the Chunin Exams, feedback on fights that happen before that arc begins would be appreciated so that I can write better fights when they matter the most.

Especially before the preliminaries begin, since there is not much room for stuff that isn't fighting as we do have 10 fights to cover with little to no pauses in-between each one. They are a bit hard to write, regardless, but fight scenes where one party is just playing with another (like Orochimaru's fight) are easier to make when compared to more normal fights like those that will happen in a more even ground (the actual Chunin Exams).

But let me stop rambling for a moment here... (Hurry! Go read the story before I start again!)

* * *

 _The Prologue_

Chapter 4: Genin X Former ANBU Captains (Current Version: 2.0)

* * *

"...So they finally decided to show up, huh?"

The genin of Team 8 were approaching quietly, however, Kakashi had been on high alert in order to detect their approach. Sadly for the trio, there were some small birds hanging around the nearby woodland, and Kakashi was well aware that the chirping noises had ceased. The genin themselves also did some small sounds of their own, mostly from interacting with branches and leaves as they made their way through the forest. Kurenai seemed to have taught them well, but not well enough to sneak up on a jonin.

"I'll need to pay some attention to this fight," he sighed, closing his book and shoving it inside one of the pockets of his flak jacket. Kakashi had spent a good half an hour pacifically reading Icha Icha Paradise and he was almost at the end of that volume by now. As he had predicted earlier, the story was leading up to a threesome, but it looked like the ending of the chapter that he was reading would have to wait.

Members of the Hyuuga Clan were highly dangerous even on light-hearted spars, but he had told Team 8 to go after him with the intention to kill. Even if Hinata wasn't very good at it, a single Jyuuken strike could still drastically alter the tides of the battle. His close call with not only Sasuke but with Naruto taught him that even genin can pull off some surprising moves if given enough leeway. _'Or maybe I'm just getting rusty,'_ he considered.

Kakashi wasn't particularly fond of the idea of possibly giving up on ninjutsu, genjutsu and one of his limbs. It didn't help that the Aburame was smart and there was a chance he'd be able to form a strategy good enough to create an opening—likely involving Kiba as a distraction—for Hinata to land a hit the one hit that she needed.

But he was not going to make it easy for them. Whatever enemies they would find in the Land of Waves wouldn't hold back either, and making them used to that kind of situation would only benefit them in the end. If that meant not giving them the chance to get the bells, so be it.

That had never been the point of his test after all.

Soon, the small noises that the three genin were making as they came in his direction ceased and a smoke ball was tossed toward Kakashi, who only raised an eyebrow at it while the ninja tool did its job, covering the area around him in a special cloud of smoke.

 _'I knew Kiba had one of those with him... let's see if they will make good use of this cover.'_ Kakash thought, remaining still. He could've escaped the area easily, of course, but then he wouldn't be able to judge their performance like he wanted to.

"Gatsuuga!"

Kiba and Akamaru appeared inside the smokescreen, spinning furiously towards Kakashi and striking the areas where the jonin was supposed to be as well as his surroundings. They were spinning too fast to use sight to track him down, but Kakashi's scent was good enough.

Even with his eyes effectively useless, the Copy Ninja's battle senses were sharp enough for him to hear the distinctive sounds that the Fang over Fang made, which helped him to identify from where each of the random attacks were coming and dodge accordingly. This allowed the feral duo to burrow underground for a few feet after each miss before resurfacing to try striking him again. This last bit is what really impressed Kakashi despite the fact that none of the Inuzuka's blows struck him. _'The Aburame has a keen mind; this was a really good idea.'_

Kakashi knew that Kiba could have just bounced into the ground to redirect his path as soon as he made contact with it, and yet he chose to continue his move for a few more seconds. This strategy, in fact, was meant to be a counter for Kakashi's Earth Release: Headhunter Jutsu.

After a few seconds of playing cat and mouse with the dog-boy and his ninken, the duo cancelled their attack a few feet away from the jonin, leaving the battlefield full of holes that severely limited their enemy's options as far as dodging went. Knowing he only had a few seconds to act before engaging in a brief hand-to-hand fight, Kakashi quickly made a simple hand sign to prepare his counter-strategy.

 _'Fuuton: Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!'_

A pair of Wind-elemental shadow clones came to life. Immediately after being created, both clones used the Body Flicker Jutsu followed by a transformation. The end result was two small logs, carefully hidden by the holes that Kiba created on the ground.

Almost immediately afterwards, Kiba and his partner entered Kakashi's field of vision (which was slowly but surely becoming clearer as the smokescreen started to disperse), one of them jumping towards him, from the left, one leg outstretched in an attempt to land a flying kick, a bold move that the boy only considered because he trusted that the smoke would provide enough cover for him to land his hit. The other was coming from Kakashi's other side, but the jonin paid no mind to what that one was doing.

As the flying Kiba descended on him, Kakashi grabbed the boy's leg and spun him around, throwing him at his partner and taking them out of the fight for a few seconds in a similar way to how he had made Akamaru vomit his stolen sandwich earlier.

Drawing one of the various blunt kunai that he had in his pouch, Kakashi was just about to toss them at the Inuzuka to force him to get up when he heard someone approaching him from behind.

Hinata immediately tossed a bunch of shuriken against Kakashi once she was noticed, but instead of blocking, the jonin merely jumped away. Not too soon after he landed, Hinata closed the distance as silently as she could and went for a palm thrust aimed at her target's midsection. Disappointed by how telegraphed and thoughtless her move was, Kakashi leaned to the side to avoid her obvious strike and proceeded to knee the girl, aiming at her vulnerable left side.

However, instead of striking flesh and bone as he had imagined, his knee went right through the girl, revealing the basic bunshin for what it was. Immediately pivoting, the jonin looked in the direction from where he had first heard the girl coming from but the only thing that he saw were projectiles piercing the smoke cloud, aimed right at him. Behind the smoke was the real Hinata, who completely ignored the visual hazard thanks to her Byakugan.

Dispelling the clone, the blue-haired girl rushed towards Kakashi, who busy blocking her shuriken, intending on using a bit of Jyuuken against the man in hopes of possibly striking his shoulder or elbow before she had to execute her part of Shino's plan.

Unlike the bunshin, the real Hinata wasn't as easy to predict. However, Kakashi had no trouble in dodging the girl's palm thrusts and finger pokes, not even the few times she used a feint and tried to go for a different target at the last moment.

 _'Decent'_ , the jonin though, watching as the girl dodged a swing from his arm and subsequently avoided being slashed with the kunai that he still held in his right hand. _'She seems to be better at dodging than attacking,'_ he noted, liking the fact that Hinata had yet to be hit by any of his slashes despite having the range disadvantage in their little duel... but still feeling underwhelmed by the girl's offense, which was sorely lacking.

Almost as if sensing the critique, Hinata became frustrated with her lack of success and went for a bold move not unlike the one that resulted in her clone being "hit". Though her thrust was much faster and harder to avoid, Kakashi still managed to not get hit by it and capitalized on the fact that she had overextended herself by grabbing her arm and pulling her towards him.

However, before he was able to toss her at Kiba and Akamaru (who just managed to untangle themselves from each other and climb out of the hole that they happened to be thrown at), the girl's finger immediately struck a point in his forearm, making Kakashi's eyes widen in surprise.

 _'She was expecting this!? Well... maybe I shouldn't have used so many throws when fighting Kiba earlier,'_ he considered, imagining that the Aburame had caught on to his pattern.

Of course, in a normal fight Kakashi would almost never rely so much on this kind of move. However his objective was merely to judge how well the trio fought, not killing them while keeping himself alive. Forcing the kids to disengage and approach him again after a few moves was a good way of gauging their skills, but it could also backfire on him as the sting of Hinata's chakra being injected into his arm just proved.

While the jonin was a bit impressed, Hinata couldn't help but feel dismayed by the fact that she was physically unable to target the joints and tip the scales in her team's favor. Still, the girl smiled a bit at the small victory as the jonin pushed her away from him, but not before managing to clumsily kick at his hip, hitting the bells in the process.

Kakashi shook his head in disappointment, knowing that the girl would be able to see it despite the smoke. "Kicking the bells away from me won't do you any good," he lectured, knowing that he could always get them back in case she managed to knock them away from him.

Hearing the jonin's words, and more importantly, the sound of the bells that came just before Kakashi spoke, Kiba smirked. The noise of the bells ringing was the signal that he and Akamaru were waiting for. It meant that Hinata was no longer close enough to be harmed by their attack and was likely in position to corner the jonin, as Shino had planned. He could have tracked them down by smell, which was the Aburame's initial intention, but sound was far easier to react to.

Kakashi was right between Kiba and his partner, and the two rushed to catch the older man in a pincer attack. The dog-in-human-form tried a low and wide leg sweep while his master went for a flying haymaker, both attacks aimed to hit Kakashi's sides. Kakashi's first instinct was to jump backwards again, but the Hyuuga coming at him with a few kunai on her hand made him think twice.

Even so, a smirk still formed beneath the jonin's black mask. _'Smart... The sweep forces me to jump, the haymaker limits my path and the kunai will catch me when I land.'_

The plan was sound, but against someone of Kakashi's level it wasn't enough. Of course, it also had a fatal flaw: Kakashi could just chakra-jump toward Kiba and grab him in midair so that he'd have a human shield against Hinata's attack... But he WAS supposed to hold back a little so, instead, he jumped straight up and made a single hand seal as soon as he saw the Hyuuga's blades coming at him.

Hinata frowned. She had seen the jonin's earlier moves with her Byakugan and relayed the information to Shino, who said he would deal with that change of plans personally before urging her to help Kiba, and thanks to that, she was already expecting that Kakashi would use the Kawarimi with one of his clones. What the girl didn't expect, though, was the big burst of wind that managed to hit her teammate and his dog as soon as her kunai struck the henged clone.

"Kiba-kun!"

Sadly, the Byakugan was unable to identify if a Kage Bunshin had been imbued with some form of elemental chakra until it was already too late, so she could do nothing more but watch as the wind explosion knocked her allies a good fifteen meters away from the epicenter of the blast. Using her dojutsu, Hinata searched for the pair to see if they were wounded.

Soon, she breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness," she said, placing her hand over her chest in an attempt to tell her heart to calm down a little. Even if it had worked, though, her heartbeat accelerated once more when she heard the noise of a second explosion happening right after she was done checking out her teammate.

Yelping, she berated herself for stopping to pay attention and quickly ran in pursuit of the jonin, who had apparently used the substitution-explosion combo again, ignoring her friend and his dog for the time being.

The wind blasts cleared away almost all of the smoke, allowing Hinata to track Kakashi even without the Byakugan. But thanks to having it on, she could also see the jonin focusing his chakra over his entire body as he ran through a few signs.

"Lighting Release: Static Skin."

This jutsu makes a weak current of electricity go through the person's skin, giving weak shock to anyone touching the user. For a human, it would have been nothing more than a small nuisance which would buy the user a second or two at most, but Kakashi hadn't been fighting a human when he made his move.

As soon as he had swapped places with his clone, Kakashi found himself covered in Shino's bugs, who had infested the network of holes that Kiba left behind after his attacks with Akamaru. Not wanting to have his chakra drained he immediately uses another substitution. Of course, the area where Kakashi reappeared also had bugs, but now that he knew what was coming he had a plan for it already, which was the D-rank Raiton technique that he had used.

The kikaichu who had latched onto Kakashi fell to the ground thanks to the damage dealt by the shock, and before other bugs could become a threat, he jumped away while starting his next jutsu. "Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!"

The burst of win scattered the bugs who were deeper inside the hole, and possibly others that were coming from the parts where the small tunnels connected with each other underground. _'They won't bother me for now'._

Once he landed, he stopped for a moment to analyze his surroundings (if he were fighting seriously, he would have done it while making the hand signs for the Raiton jutsu, but that was not the case). Kakashi noted that he was still in the area that Kiba had practically destroyed with his digging technique, and undoubtedly all of the underground portion of that part of the clearing was full of bugs, so he needed to get away from there in case there were more. He could also see the Aburame's teammates coming to where he was, but the sneaky bug-user was nowhere to be seen.

As he jumped away, he couldn't help but laugh a little at how angry Kiba looked.

"You're not escaping my claws this time!" the boy screamed, running like a normal human being since his focus and control over the technique had been messed up by Kakashi's Wind Release: Shadow Clone Jutsu.

"Thank you for telling me which one is Akamaru!" the jonin shouted back in a happy tone as he made a thumbs up, making the feral boy growl quite loudly as he continued to run with Akamaru close by and Hinata a few feet behind

 _'Good'_ , Kakashi thought. _'He is not resorting to the Fang over Fang now that his cover is gone.'_ Still, openly dashing at the enemy was often not the best choice, as Kakashi was just about to demonstrate to the Inuzuka once he finished making the seals for his jutsu.

"Water Release: Slippery Stream!"

The jonin shot a moderate amount of water on the ground in front of him, but this water was a bit different from normal water. As the name might have suggested, it was somewhat oily and sticky: perfect for traps or simply to catch those that were stupid enough to come running at full speed towards the slippery liquid.

"Whoooooa!"

As soon as Kiba stepped into the area affected by Kakashi's technique he started to lose his balance. It didn't matter where the he tried to place his feet to support his weight, the ground seemingly refused to want him to keep standing. Learning from his master's mistake, Akamaru easily jumped over the water, positioned to pounce at the jonin.

After spending a mere two seconds trying to desperately find some sort of solid ground to step on, the watery floor defeated the Inuzuka, who feel flat on his face. Of course, he still kept sliding even after crashing until his body slid out of the puddle, groaning as he attempted to get up only to fall again thanks to the water that was still on his hands

Hinata's lips were trembling, her jaw firmly shut in an attempt to not laugh at her teammate after his comical accident. However, seeing Kakashi introduce his boot to Akamaru's face made her snap out of it. _'What am I doing?! If we were fighting against a real enemy, Kiba-kun would've died right there!'_

The girl briefly shook her head, annoyed by her lack of focus. _'At this rate they are never going to get the bells.'_

Deciding to be actually useful, Hinata quickly jumped to where Kiba was and helped him get up. "Here," she said, grabbing the Inuzuka by his sleeve to support him. The girl's dojutsu allowed her to find out which parts of Kiba's coat weren't glowing from being in contact with the area affected by the Slippery Stream, which she avoided when touching him.

"Thanks..." the boy muttered, upset about yet again failing to do anything significant against the jonin. As Hinata released his sleeve, she observed that the area that had been in contact with Kakashi's technique was drying at an incredibly fast rate, allowing Kiba to support himself again since his boots weren't unusable anymore.

Hinata wasn't surprised when the Inuzuka started growling, since she had seen that Kakashi's kick had managed to do enough damage to dispel Akamaru's transformation, effectively taking him out of the fight. "Dammit!" Kiba cursed out loud, angered by losing his partner for the duration of the battle.

But he didn't have time to react further as Kakashi suddenly jumped away from them once more; in the place where he previously stood, only a few shuriken remained. Glancing at Hinata, he saw her using her thumbs and pointer fingers to form the shape of a triangle.

Grinning, and well aware of who had been behind of that attack and where they had come from, he quickly made the seal for the Beast Mimicry: Four Legs Technique to boost his speed and ran as fast as he could in order to execute his part of the plan—one that he knew wasn't made by Hinata.

Kakashi hadn't caught Hinata's message, though, and only raised an eyebrow once he noticed Kiba taking position a few feet away from him, to his side. The boy was close to the area full of holes, intent on not letting the jonin pass. Akamaru was sprawled in the ground right behind him, and Kiba wasn't about to let Kakashi get to his partner and use him as a hostage. That would effectively end the fight right there, but the boy wasn't aware that Kakashi wouldn't even consider that kind of strategy.

Hinata also moved, taking a similar position. The other part of the clearing that stood behind her; a grassy plain that hadn't been introduced to Kiba or Akamaru's spinning attacks. The last member of the team landed on what would become the last point of their triangle formation, guarding the wooded area found at the edge of the clearing. All three of Team 8's genin were only roughly ten feet away from Kakashi.

"Well, well... nice to see that you are still here, Shino. I thought you had ran away and left the bulk of the work for you friends." The Aburame didn't acknowledge Kakashi's jab, though he offered a slight nod to Hinata, glad that she had been watching him through the Byakugan and thus was able to notice him drawing a big triangle on the ground a few seconds ago. The girl looked a little battered, but she seemed much better than when he had first met her after being separated by Kakashi.

The blue-haired girl smiled slightly in return while Kiba was busy glaring daggers at the silver-haired man, but the smile fell only a second afterward as she turned to face the jonin while scanning the area for any logs or clones that Kakashi might have left behind.

The next few seconds were permeated by a tense silence.

Realizing the kids were most likely trying to think about what to do while not being able to tell their team about their strategy, he started talking a bit to disrupt their thoughts. "So, the three little pigs finally _cornered_ the big bad wolf. What happens now?" the jonin taunted, making absolutely clear to the three genin that he could get away easily if he wanted to.

Shino kicked himself mentally for his lack of foresight. _'To an outsider, it might look like he is trapped... but clearly, Kakashi is the one in control. I should've known better than trying this,'_ he thought bitterly.

"You know, I don't have all day..." Kakashi complained, purposefully reminding the kids that they couldn't waste too much time. They merely shared uncertain glances, all three of them trying to cook up some sort of plan that would give them an opening subtle enough that wouldn't make the jonin flee and make them waste more time chasing him down.

Just as Shino got an idea and was preparing to make use of the portion of his colony that was hidden behind Kiba to force a reaction out of him, Kakashi took the initiative and attempted to escape before the kids could even do anything.

After a few hand signs, the ground directly beneath the jonin opened up, making Kiba's eyes widen. "That jutsu...!"

Leaping forward, he tried to catch the jonin before his whole body was underground but he was too late, only managing to hit the patch of undisturbed earth that remained where a hole once had been.

Remembering his previous encounter with the Doton jutsu, the Inuzuka crouched and brought his ear to the ground, hoping to track down where Kakashi was going—or who he was planning to target. He only hoped that the jonin wasn't planning on escaping into the woods... but as it turned out, that was not what Kakashi intended.

"Hinata, he's coming after you!"

That was all the warning the Hyuuga heiress needed to run away as fast as she could. _'Shino-kun said I was needed for the team to work... we might get separated after this is over, but I can't leave them until they get the bells!'_

Through her special eyes, she noticed Shino manipulating the bugs that were left in the area previously affected by the smoke bomb, while Kiba remained with his ear planted on the ground.

The boy was trying to calculate how much time Hinata would have before getting caught... and now he was really regretting not paying attention to Iruka when they were introduced to physics.

Knowing he had little time remaining to keep failing at math, he decided that what worked for him during the academy would have to work now. "Hinata, you have about eight seconds before he catches you!" he exclaimed, hoping that his guess was correct.

As Hinata watched Shino's kikaichu overtake her, ready to ambush the jonin when he landed, a plan started forming in her mind. It was unconventional for a Hyuuga, and playing decoy when her team barely had any time to best Kakashi and grab the bells was definitely very risky, but if it worked...

She would be leaving her friends to fight without her help (which wouldn't be very valuable, in her opinion), but the trade-off would be more than worth the trouble.

If Kakashi had a Byakugan, he would have noticed his targeting gathering a lot of chakra on her legs and concluded that she was planning to chakra-jump away from him. Then, perhaps, he would have given up on pursing the Hyuuga for the moment... but his dojutsu was not the Byakugan, and he continued travelling underground in hopes of catching the person who could do the most harm to him.

As soon as Hinata gathered enough chakra on her legs, she stopped. By her calculations she still had four seconds, and it was barely enough for what she would be trying to do. Of course, she failed to account for the fact that Kiba assumed that she would keep running when he blurted out that she only had eight seconds remaining... but then again, Kiba had given her less time than she had in reality, so it worked out for her in the end.

The Inuzuka, though, was still betting on being correct and couldn't help but freak out once he saw that his female teammate braked. "Hinata, what are you doing?! Run!"

In response, the girl merely turned around and nodded to him, her expression showing a fiery determination that Kiba had yet to see in Hinata's face. It was then that Kiba understood what her plan was—or at least he thought he did. _'I got it! She's using herself as bait to slow him down! He will have to stop for a moment to bury her... okay, I will go ahead of her to ambush him when he comes back instead of digging her up!'_ Smirking, he motioned for his other teammate to follow him and made his way to where Hinata was.

Hinata closed her eyes and concentrated, waiting for the right moment as she carefully watched her feet using her Byakugan.

As if things were in slow motion, she could feel the ground being slightly disturbed by Kakashi's approach, until the disturbance got more noticeable as his hands eventually came out from the ground and finally... they grabbed her shins and started to pull her into the ground.

Kiba had told her that he was grabbed only with one hand, but two hands? That was much better than what she had planned for.

A mere second after grabbing the Hyuuga, Kakashi hands suddenly burned with an extreme pain before becoming completely numb, as opposed to the mere sting that he could still feel in his forearm.

But Kakashi was an experienced shinobi. He was used to fighting while in pain and he was also used to fight surprising opponents, so he really had only faltered for a second before ignoring the pain and coming up with a way to salvage his plan. Manipulating the earth chakra around his feet to make him fall further underground, Kakashi used gravity to help him drag the girl with him, successfully burying her despite not being able to use his hands to pull her legs.

The Headhunter Jutsu only needed chakra to be sent to his legs, as the jutsu was actually only about making the earth below his feet crumble or reform, allowing him to move underground as he saw fit. (Anything else was just the user being smart while using it). In other words, he didn't need his hands after initiating the technique... which, Kakashi noted to himself, was incredibly good for him.

He didn't know the specifics behind her maneuver, but Hinata had apparently sent a burst of chakra to his arms while using her legs, which was something he had never even heard of before. Now Kakashi could no longer use his hands to mold chakra or even make hand signs since they were also numb and damaged... so if the Headhunter needed his hands in order to get out of the ground, he'd be dead unless the Inuzuka somehow knew the Garouga and immediately acted to dig him out, and since he wasn't hit by Akamaru's Dynamic Marking he'd also have to count on the Inuzuka not hitting him by accident.

Ignoring what could have been, he quickly came out of hiding, with his arms hanging limply to his side and completely numb.

What caught his interest, though, was that the Inuzuka was just about to reach his current position, aiming to do a low attack similarly to what Akamaru had tried before. The jonin could also hear the noise that could only have come from the Aburame's bugs getting louder and louder from behind him... and Shino himself was rushing towards him with a kunai in hand, a few meters behind his remaining teammate.

Kakashi instinctively realized that he would be completely unable to use any ninjutsu or draw any weapons for the remainder of the test—his legs were pretty much the only thing he could depend on. Well, actually, his shoulder still worked fine and he could actually swing the defective limbs if necessary, but after being hit by that awkward Gentle "Fist" strike, he wasn't going to bet on his arms.

Still, it was undeniable that right now the two boys were the ones with the advantage, since they were coming to kill and he was not... of course, that's ignoring the fact that Kakashi could fight extremely well with his legs alone, but even after being hit by Hinata's attack, he still had to hold back to a certain level. _'Heh, these two might actually get the bells if this keeps up...'_

The next moments would be decisive. Regardless of who was going to win, it would all come down to these next few seconds...

And nobody noticed that Hinata had fainted almost as soon as she struck Kakashi, falling unconscious even before her body was fully dragged into the ground by the jonin.

The true cause of that fainting would remain a mystery for a few days. Only when the group returned from their mission in the Land of Waves that Hinata would find out how much of an impact it would have on her life...

* * *

"I found it!" Naruto exclaimed, pointing at Sakura. "It's Sakura-chan's headband, right sensei?"

The pink-haired girl instinctively moved her hand to her head, only to find out that the cold metallic plate emblazoned with the symbol of the Leaf village was protecting her sizable forehead instead of working as a tiara of sorts like it usually did.

"That's right...! It's in the wrong place!" Sakura gasped. _'Well, that explains why my hair kept getting in the way...'_ the girl noted to herself, wondering if maybe it was time to cut her bangs already. _'Wait, was that part of the illusion too!?'_

The jonin merely smiled as an answer, making the Uzumaki rush towards his teammates to break them from the small-scale illusion. Kurenai had given the trio two simple tasks: find the difference between genjutsu and reality, then break the illusion. If they failed to correctly identify what part of the genjutsu didn't match the real world Kurenai didn't even let them try to break free of it.

"Yes! I did it! Take that, you stupid genjutsu!" the boy exclaimed, jumping in happiness. He had been working hard to spot the discrepancies, but most of the time he hadn't been able to get it right before his teammates; especially not once Kurenai starting using D-rank illusions instead of extremely basic E-rank ones, such as one that changed the color of a nearby tree.

And in the few occasions where he _had_ beenfaster than Sakura and Sasuke, the Uzumaki had another roadblock to deal with: Chakra Pulses. Sending too much chakra into someone that was affected by a genjutsu messed up the illusion, but the target's body would be too focused on getting rid of the high amounts of foreign chakra from the release attempt to actually notice and purge the subtler quantity responsible for the genjutsu.

Kurenai had told them that a small burst of chakra would be enough, but what was small to Naruto really wasn't small for most people. The Genjutsu Mistress had been somewhat excited by discovering something new about her craft (nobody else used as much chakra as Naruto did, since it was just a waste of resources), but she had to change the focus of her training to account for this new development.

On the field, Naruto could always warn his team of the genjutsu and have them break it for him instead... but if he could do it himself, the group would be free of the illusion a few seconds earlier. And as every shinobi worth their salt knows, a single second is enough to severely change the tides of a battle.

But Sasuke hadn't been very happy about wasting time with that.

"Don't be so loud, idiot." The Uchiha hadn't even looked at Sakura throughout the whole ordeal, instead focusing on other objects around him, like trees, but he was sure that he would've figured it out instantly if Sakura had entered his line of sight. He didn't need Naruto to break free of a simple D-rank genjutsu.

"Now, now, Sasuke. You know that Naruto has trouble with that," Kurenai said in a disapproving tone, receiving only a grunt in response.

Meanwhile, Naruto was asking Sakura for a high-five, which she agreed, feeling a bit glad to see the boy succeeding after working so hard for the past hour. Seeing the blond failing to get the basics right was generally just another reason for the girl to mock him, but personally witnessing his struggles for the first time in her life reminded Sakura of herself.

If you didn't have a clan to support you, understanding and correctly applying the basic teachings of the academy wasn't very simple... and even then, the situation wasn't exactly easy. As Sasuke could attest to, clans would also have their kids be taught special ninjutsu that were heavily associated with them. While he learned how to do the Fire Release: Great Fireball at an early age, it had been very hard to make the C-rank Katon technique work correctly... especially with his father pressuring him with comparisons to his genius brother, Itachi.

Of course, that didn't stop either of them from mocking Naruto up until that moment, but now, they couldn't help but sympathize with him and respect him a little more (though Sasuke vehemently refused to show it, his pride not allowing him to acknowledge a weakling like Naruto just yet).

"Good job, Naruto!" Sakura smiled.

"Thanks Sakura-chan!" he returned the smile. "To commemorate, let's go on a date after training! I know this place where—"

"NEVER!"

And that was as far as he got before receiving a nasty uppercut that almost broke his jaw.

Of course, Naruto was still Naruto. The bad still outweighed the good in him as far as Sakura and Sasuke were concerned.

Kurenai couldn't help but shake her head at the whole situation (though part of her was currently wondering how the hell Naruto's teeth were still there after that hit).

The team dynamics were exactly as Kakashi described to the Hokage in their last meeting: volatile. It didn't take much for two of the three genin to interact and cause a reaction that was generally toxic for the team as a whole and liable to strain the shaky bonds between them even further. Not trusting your teammates and trying to do things by yourself were sure-fire ways of getting oneself killed in the field, and she couldn't allow the situation to remain as bad as it currently was.

Clearing her throat to get the attention of the kids in front of her, the woman started talking. "Well, that part of today's training is done. Sakura, Sasuke, excellent work. I'm very pleased that you two have been able to learn the two illusions I've taught you, but do remember to keep practicing them so that you can better use them in combat."

Kurenai saw that Sasuke didn't react much to the compliment besides nodding in acknowledgment of her words, but if he was anything like Shino, it just meant he was probably just not trying to show that he was pleased... which was the complete opposite of Sakura, who looked positively radiant.

"What about me?" Naruto asked with a look of expectancy in his eyes and a small hint of frustration from being unable to keep up with his teammates.

"I'll be honest with you, Naruto," Kurenai's tone was serious, putting the boy on the edge immediately. "I didn't expect to have to go back to the basics so much today... but I think you did very well!" she concluded, smiling reassuringly at Naruto who couldn't help but sigh in relief before smiling brightly once again.

The boy was now much better equipped to deal with genjutsu-users, and even if he didn't have what it took to actually cast some on his own, he'd have higher chances of returning from their mission alive if they happened to face that kind of ninja.

"But you see, while you don't have talent for genjutsu, I still want you in my classes as often as you can." Upon seeing the boy's confused expression, she elaborated. "The first and by far the most important thing about fighting genjutsu specialists is recognizing that you are under their spell, and you still have to work hard on that area, ok?"

"Heh, no problem! I'll get it done in no time, believe it!" he laughed, but his grin suddenly turned into a confused frown. "Uh, wait a sec... that means I'll be the training dummy again, won't I?" Kurenai's smile was all that Naruto needed to see before groaning in frustration, causing Sakura to once again laugh at his antics... or perhaps at his misery?

"Don't worry so much about it, Naruto. Much like today, you won't be subjected to any of the harsher illusions yet." The boy calmed down visibly, doing his best to ignore the last part of Kurenai's comment. "Just remember to always observe what's around you and never let your fears conquer you; that's all you need to stop almost all genjutsu before it is too late." Of course, Kurenai knew it was easier said than done, but if the blond truly wished to become Hokage one day, this kind of training would be necessary, she thought.

"Um... almost all? So there are genjutsu that can't be broken?" Sakura tilted her head in confusion. _'The academy's books never talked about this.'_

The Uchiha answered her instead of the jonin. "For you, yes. Some of the Sharingan's exclusive jutsu can only be broken by another Sharingan. I will be able break you out of almost all of them once mine awakens, but I think the stronger ones can only be broken if the target was me to begin with." The boy closed his eyes in reminiscence. _'That genjutsu Itachi used on me that time... I have the feeling that I'll need something stronger than the basic one-tomoe sharingan to have a shot at breaking it. I can't be hit by that thing again.'_

Seeing the scowl on the genin's face, Kurenai correctly guessed he was thinking about his brother and decided to change the subject for the time being. "Now let's talk a bit more in-depth about Sasuke and Sakura. Both of you did very well with the two genjutsu I taught you, especially Sakura. I knew you had good chakra control, but you only took a total of 25 minutes to master the two genjutsu. That's a really good time!"

Sakura's smiled almost as widely as Naruto usually did, gleefully basking in the praise she had been given. Kurenai returned it with a proud smile of her own, thinking that maybe she had really found the person who would be her successor one day, but then she turned to face her other student.

"And you, Sasuke, also did very well. You took roughly 40 minutes to get the hang of the illusions because you had a bit of trouble in figuring out the right amount of chakra to work with, but don't worry; it's absolutely normal. Though in your case, specifically, we might have a problem."

Sasuke's eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

"You haven't awakened it just yet, but the Sharingan consumes a lot of chakra while in use. That, coupled with how costly the Great Fireball is, means that you must be really careful with your reserves. All of your techniques would be draining you more than they should, so don't throw them around carelessly, ok?"

The boy nodded, still looking as stoic as ever. On the inside, though, he couldn't help but envy his other two teammates. Annoying and stupid as they might be, Sakura seemed to have a talent for managing her chakra output, while Naruto had stupidly high reserves... if he had both of those skills, Sasuke knew he would be unstoppable.

But he still had a lot of work before facing Itachi one day. ' _I can't even use the Sharingan yet,'_ he thought, starting to feel angry at how little he had accomplished when compared to his brother.

From the corner of his vision, he saw Kurenai looking at him with a hint of worry in her eyes. It piqued his curiosity, but he had no idea of what to make of it.

The woman then sat down on the grass, the kids gladly taking the hint to do the same in mere seconds, happy to enjoy a well-deserved break. None of them commented on how the jonin seemingly had frozen for a moment. "So, before we go meet up with Kakashi and my team I want you all to tell me how Team 7 could use these two genjutsu that I taught to Sasuke and Sakura." Neither of the illusions were useful on their own, but Kurenai knew that the trio had ways to make these techniques work in their favor by playing the right cards.

Surprisingly, Naruto was the first one to say something despite being the only one not able to use the techniques they would be discussion. "Well... the first genjutsu, the... uh..."

"Frozen Image..." Sakura completed flatly.

"Yeah, that! Thanks Sakura-chan." he smiled at his crush, who stared unimpressed at him. "Anyways, that one is a lot like a photo, right?" Kurenai hesitated for a second but nodded, surprised by the unusual comparison. "So I thought, maybe we could use this genjutsu when to, like, take a picture of an area that we want the enemy to see even after it's no longer there!"

"For example...?" Sasuke asked skeptically.

"Uh... maybe we could use it on an empty clearing and fill it with traps?" Naruto offered uncertainly.

"This genjutsu doesn't cover a wide area," Sasuke reminded the blond, "But something small like an explosive tag or a pitfall would work, right?" The Uchiha could see it what Naruto was, but not in the heat of battle without some other setup. _'Might be useful if our team needs to play defensively for a while, though. Naruto's good at distracting people so setting this up as a team won't be a huge problem.'_

Kurenai smiled at the trio. "That's a good use of it. But you can also do the inverse: make the enemy see traps that are no longer there, like a smoke bomb."

Sakura considered the idea for a moment. "That could work. I mean, the illusion is just about the right size to keep one of those cheaper smoke bombs going for longer, right?" Cheap ninja equipment is generally not worth the trouble, but more expensive smoke bombs had a bigger area-of-effect and wouldn't be as compatible with that technique. Or with Sakura's wallet _._

"Yes. And it's worth remembering that quite a few applications of the clone jutsu can work with this one too. And what about the Scorch Smell?" Kurenai asked, referring to the second illusion that she had taught them. This was another simple D-rank genjutsu, one that manipulated the target's sense of smell, making then feel a strong scent of something burning in the area where the illusion was casted.

"This one is for me, right?"

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "Why just you? I learned it too." From his tone, it was clear that the Uchiha hadn't been particularly impressed by the jutsu.

"Well, it's a bit useless if we don't have a fire going. I don't know any Fire jutsu and neither does Naruto, but you do." Sakura answered. "You know, if your Great Fireball misses the enemy, you can still make them think that you got something like a tree... I dunno, maybe it could keep them away from that area?" The girl shrugged. "They won't want to get burned so until they see that nothing is actually burning they won't dodge in that direction." Sakura, too, hadn't seen much use for the illusion. It was very circumstantial.

"Could make them think their clothes are on fire too!" Naruto snickered, making Sasuke raise an eyebrow as he considered the idea.

"You would need to know where they will be dodging to, though." Kurenai piped in. "But think outside the box for a moment. You three are part of an assault squad, yes, but fighting is not going to be the only thing you will be doing."

The group spent a few seconds thinking.

"Oh, I got it!" Naruto spoke up. "We could bait enemies into checking out what is burning, right? Like, if we are storming an enemy base or something cool like that."

"I don't think we will be getting big infiltration missions, but that could work if we can't just trash the place," Sasuke agreed, noting that the blond was being more useful than usual. _'All those years spent pranking people weren't a total waste, it seems.'_

Kurenai still hadn't achieved what she wanted, though. "Hmm... let me give you a situation: you are making camp in the middle of a forest and know that a few enemies will arrive later at night to ambush you thanks to having a sensory ninja or a Byakugan user with you. How can you deal with this?" Of course, that wasn't a random example Kurenai had used. There was a chance that her team or Kakashi's dogs would detect enemies waiting to ambush them during the one night that they would spend on the road before arriving at their destination.

While herself and Kakashi would probably be there to deal with any threats, Kurenai didn't know how much Gatou was willing to pay to see their client dead. There's a chance the she and Kakashi would need to play decoy before reaching the Land of Waves so , if they were fighting against too many assassins, and this would force the kids to go escape by themselves. _'I really hope that this Gatou is stingy with his money and only hires an assassin or two...'_

Once again, the group went silent... but this time, it was Sasuke that came up with an idea. "We could use this to make them think we were camping somewhere else to buy us some time to escape or ambush them back instead."

"Perfect! That's the answer I was looking for." The Genjutsu Mistress smiled brightly. "That was excellent, Team 7. The only things I should add is that for regarding the Scorching Smell, an explosive tag could be used instead of a fire jutsu, so even Sasuke can make use of this skill."

That comment made her remember a past "prank" of her own. "I remember that when I was taking the test to become a jonin, I almost managed to trick my genjutsu proctor into activating the fire alarm with this jutsu. She thought the ninjutsu examination that was happening next door went wrong for a few seconds there." The woman giggled a bit. "The worried look on her face was priceless."

Naruto laughed with her. "Man, it sucks that I can't do any genjutsu. They could've been very useful for my pranks!" His mood soured a bit but it was still good overall, especially once he remembered how far he could take his pranks if he used shadow clones.

"Naruto, listen to me," Kurenai warned, growing serious. "You have just graduated from the academy, and now you are not only considered a ninja, but also legally an adult. Pranking people from now on will have consequences, especially if you use any kind of jutsu or ninja tool. You could even have your headband taken away from you depending on how offensive the transgression is so—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know that already!" the blond interrupted, waving dismissively at the jonin and ignoring her scowl. "Iruka-sensei already talked to me about that. I won't be pranking people anymore... well, unless it's for the good of the village, like busting a pervert on the hot springs or something."

"You better," the woman said ambiguously, not wanting to openly encourage him to prank people, but still agreeing that peeping toms were scum that deserved being discovered and subsequently mauled by their own targets.

"Well, I suppose we are done here for now," Kurenai stated as she got up. "You three did very well today, just keep it up. There is still a lot of work to do before the day is over." Outwardly the woman was smiling, but inwardly she was now feeling nervous. _'Should I really go through with this?'_ she wondered, shooting another concerned look at Sasuke. The Genjutsu Mistress was aware that her plan could backfire badly, but it was also the plan with the best chance of working.

 _'And such is the life of a ninja...'_ she thought, holding back a sigh and steeling herself for what was to come as she watched Naruto happily exclaim something about wanting some ramen for lunch, only to be chewed out by his teammates soon afterwards.

Their bickering was suddenly interrupted when the three heard a sharp sound, one that they were extremely familiar with after spending a few years practicing with kunai and shuriken. Also, the genin briefly noticed a thin shadow that very quickly appeared in between the three of them.

But before Sasuke, Sakura, or Naruto could put one and one together in the brief second they had to react to the situation, another noise caught their attention: A dull thud of something decently heavy hitting the ground—a sound that came from somewhere right in front of them.

Sakura screamed in terror, loudly, for about two seconds before Sasuke's hand quickly covered her mouth as the Uchiha started to realize the kind of situation they were in. Naruto completely silent as what he was seeing was finally processed by his brain. The three kids were all staring at the same place, eyes widened from surprise... and fear.

Kurenai's body was sprawled on the ground, her forehead dripping blood thanks to a kunai that was buried in her skull. Only the very beginning of the blade could be seen, as the dagger was stuck so deeply inside her that the biggest visible portion of the weapon was its hilt. The woman's face was frozen in an expression of surprise, but considering the kunai that was in her hand, it was obvious that her instincts and experience as a jonin allowed her to act as soon as she could... but that simply hadn't been fast enough, and as a result, the Genjutsu Mistress was reduced to nothing more than a corpse, bleeding slowly on the grass.

Almost as sudden as Kurenai's death, a powerful wave of killing intent made itself known to the three children.

It was a crushing sensation, like having a massive boulder dropped right above you, crushing your body and making you unable to do anything but breath—and only barely.

Their minds, though, were still working, and thanks to that, each one of the kids realized two simple facts at that moment:

Whoever was right behind them was able to land a killing blow on a powerful jonin-level ninja without any sort of trouble... and that any of them could very well be the person's next target, and rather easy ones considering how all of them were sitting on the ground with their backs turned to this unknown enemy.

But for one of the three members of Team 7, there was one little thing about Kurenai's murderer that was far scarier than everything they had figured out about this mysterious individual.

"Disappointing."

It was his voice.

Sasuke was already a fairly pale person, but every bit of color drained from his face at the moment he recognized the owner of that deep, cold tone. He had heard it before...

"Hmph," the man scoffed. "Don't tell me that you really believed that genjutsu of all things would ever make you strong enough to defeat me."

How could Sasuke ever forget that voice? It was impossible... not when he kept hearing it almost every night right before waking up in a cold sweat once his nightmares were finally over.

"Didn't you just tell your teammates that the Sharingan can reverse illusions, Sasuke?"

His fear was soon forgotten as rage and hatred took over instantly, forcing the boy to instantly get up and turn around.

It was _him_.

Standing only about 30 meters away from Team 7 was Kurenai's killer. He wore generic pale black pants and shirt, with the latter covered by a grey flak jacket and with a Leaf headband shining on his forehead: The usual outfit for someone that belonged to the ANBU of Konoha. His hair was black and smooth, pulled back in a ponytail. But his identity was obvious... There was only one person that could be looking at him with that pair of blazing crimson eyes with a trio of black, swirly spots surrounding the pupil.

A pair fully developed Sharingan eyes.

Standing in front of Sasuke, and also of his teammates who had finally gathered the courage to turn around, was none other than the man who was single-handedly responsible for brutally slaughtering the entirety of the most powerful clan in Konoha... with the notable exception of a single little boy.

Itachi Uchiha... Sasuke's own older brother.

"You have grown ever since we last met, otouto. But the question is: are you strong enough to defeat me yet?" Itachi shook his head in disappointment, slowly. "Though we both know the answer to that question, don't we?"

Sasuke could only see red as he fell for the rather obvious taunt. Still, despite his fury and how much he wanted to just rush at the older Uchiha and reduce him to nothing more than a bloody corpse, now that he truly got confirmation that Itachi was indeed right there... Sasuke found that his legs refused to move, despite his commands. As much as the younger Uchiha hated to admit it, he was still shaken up from the pressure of his brother's killing intent and from the sudden, ruthless way that he had killed Kurenai. His entire being was screaming at him to stop, keeping him from approaching the highly dangerous S-ranked rouge ninja.

Surprisingly, however, Sasuke could still move his arms to a degree. Shakily, he grabbed a fistful of shuriken from the pouch strapped to his right leg and tossed them at his brother with as much strength as he could muster, but the older Uchiha only shook his head.

"Pathetic," he spat disdainfully as the projectiles were about to hit him. "Considering that you are famous for being the strongest _genin_ of your year, I expected better than this." Itachi purposefully focused on Sasuke's rank to remind him of how far he was from being able to compete with him. This, added to the fact that the man effortlessly dodged Sasuke's attack, only made the boy more furious.

With hatred fueling his actions, Sasuke was now able to run towards his brother, but he only took a few steps before his eldest brother started to speak once again.

"Let me show you how I used shuriken when I was only two years younger than you." Itachi then blitzed through hand seals at a speed that the kids couldn't even comprehend and spat a watermelon-sized fireball that hovered in front of his face, before throwing a dozen of shuriken at it.

"Katon: Hosenka Tsumabeni." The blades absorbed the fire chakra and carried it with them as they approached Sasuke and his teammates. The younger Uchiha wasn't intimidated by the attack and opted to make a few seals of his own in response.

Some of the throwing stars soon struck Sasuke, but his body exploded in a cloud of smoke, making Itachi raise an eyebrow once he spotted the wooden log on the ground where his brother's corpse was supposed to be. Quite a few of the remaining shuriken, though, still continued to travel towards the remaining members of Team 7, who had already managed to turn around by that point

Immediately, ignoring what was happening to his brother's teammates, Itachi turned around and jabbed the area where his left shoulder previously was, countering Sasuke's attempt to land a haymaker from his blind spot, sending the boy reeling backwards from the punch that struck his gut. Still, the shock of having his surprise attack so easily countered didn't detain the younger Uchiha from trying to engage his older brother in a duel of taijutsu. But sadly for Sasuke, Itachi's experience and his dojutsu made his rush pointless, as every punch and kick that the younger Uchiha attempted was effortlessly dodged by his brother. Sasuke's attacks were fast, but not fast enough to get the upper hand over someone with a Sharingan.

Much to the boy's ire, Itachi kept staring impassively at him during the whole exchange, sending an unspoken message of "You disappoint me once again, little brother" that Sasuke could hear loud and clear.

Sasuke was focused so intently on his brother that he failed to notice how suddenly an army of over seventy Narutos was coming towards both of the Uchihas. Itachi, however, was well aware of the nosy blonds that were behind him. Acting quickly, he grabbed Sasuke's leg as the boy overextended himself after attempting a sideways kick at his mid-section, the former ANBU captain threw the genin at the horde of clones that was quickly approaching him.

To the original Naruto's great surprise, Itachi managed to throw Sasuke right where he actually was, destroying a half a dozen or so clones that were unfortunate enough to be on Sasuke's flight path in the process.

 _'How did he know which one was the real me?! Is... Is that the power of the Sharingan?'_ The blond thought incredulously.

The other clones were aware that their boss was hit by their own teammate. Most of the Narutos briefly stopped to check if the real one was alright.

It was then that Itachi made his move.

Sasuke and the original Naruto disentangled themselves from each other. Naruto got up first and offered a hand to his teammate, realizing that much like when they fought Kakashi, teamwork would be key to their survival. "C'mon, we need to—"

"Shut up." The Uchiha swatted the blond's hand, standing up with his own strength. The two boys glared at each other for a moment, but they quickly looked back to their enemy once they heard multiple poof-like noises coming from that direction.

Itachi was calmly walking up to them. His sword was drawn and a big cloud of smoke could be seem behind the older Uchiha. The man had slayed all of Naruto's clones in only a few seconds, using nothing more than kenjutsu and pure speed.

It was the obvious truth, but without seeing it themselves, neither of the two boys could truly believe that it had really happened. However, one person had witnessed what Sasuke's brother had done to the clones: Sakura.

The girl was currently sprawled on the ground near a few of the burning shuriken that came from Itachi's previous attack. She had been too shocked by Kurenai's death and Itachi's killer intent to properly react to man's fire technique, so Naruto had to tackle her to the ground after seeing that screaming at her to dodge wasn't going to work. The blond had immediately used the forbidden version of his favorite jutsu and rushed to help Sasuke... but Sakura still hadn't moved an inch.

The girl was absolutely terrified and completely frozen... if you ignored how hard she was trembling, that is.

Unlike Naruto and Sasuke, who still were trying to at least land one blow on Itachi, Sakura had no delusions about their chances of survival. If he had managed to murder practically the entire Uchiha clan by himself, it was clear that he was on a whole other level than your average jonin, and Team 7 was _nothing_ when compared to any kind of jonin.

The pink-haired could only stare at the unfolding fight, tears of despair falling from her face as all hope of leaving that training ground alive left her. _'We're all going to die...!'_

Sakura's theory about Itachi's abilities was confirmed when Sasuke's best attempts at engaging the man with taijutsu were completely useless, but the missing-nin wasn't done yet. He also managed to prove to her that there was no escaping him when she saw how the man effortlessly destroyed Naruto's clones with his blade. The army of Narutos never stood a chance against the rogue Uchiha; he was simply far, far too fast for them.

Running away wasn't going to do them any good, Sakura realized, struggling to breath thanks to the pressure of being subjugated to Itachi's massive killing intent.

Despite that, the blond was determined to keep fighting alongside their other teammate. "So... what's the plan?" He tried to speak with a cocky tone, but instead his voice came out shaky and laced with fear.

"There's no plan," Sasuke admitted. "I told you when our team was formed that day in the academy: don't get in my way! Take Sakura and run—this fight is mine." Both Uchihas were glaring at each other waiting for one of them to crack and move.

Naruto, on the other hand, was fully focused on Sasuke. "Are you crazy?! All three of us couldn't take on Kakashi-sensei when he was holding back and this guy is actually trying to kill us! How the hell do you plan on winning?! Just because you were the top—"

"I told you to shut up!" The black-haired boy briefly moved his eyes from Itachi to Naruto. "I know that my brother is stronger than this... he's _toying_ with us," he whispered, more out of anger from not understanding Itachi's actions than any desire to hide that comment from the man. That would just be foolish; Sasuke was perfectly aware that Itachi could just read his lips thanks to the Sharingan. "I don't know what it is but he wants something." As much as Sasuke didn't want to admit it, he knew that Itachi could've easily killed them already... but he had no answers to the questions that came from knowing that truth.

Without waiting for Naruto's reply, Sasuke once again dashed towards Itachi. This time the boy drew a kunai as he ran, foolishly intending to clash with Itachi's small katana (though to Sasuke's credit, it was a smarter tactic than relying on pure taijutsu). However, instead of using his blade, Itachi decided to simply avoid Sasuke's slash and counter with a violent knee thrust. The attack was easily strong enough to break a few ribs, in addition to knocking the boy upwards for an instant—and that moment was all that Itachi needed to pivot and land a powerful sideways kick, sending the younger Uchiha flying into the air until he crashed into a tree a few meters away from his older brother.

 _'Bastard!'_ Sasuke screamed in his mind, not being able to verbally share his thoughts with Itachi at the moment due to having little to not air inside his lungs... never mind the fact that Itachi's blows also hurt considerably.

Lying on the ground and struggling to breath despite the pain, Sasuke managed to calm down slightly. _'I... I am not strong enough yet... dammit!'_

Of course, much like his brother had implied before, Sasuke was fully aware of how trivial his attempts to land a hit on his brother were.

From the very beginning Sasuke had known that Itachi completely outclassed him, no matter the criteria used to compare the two. However, his mad desire to kill his brother blinded him from seeing the truth. But before the boy was able to dwell on his failure any further, he heard Sakura's voice.

She was screaming Naruto's name, and even though she was far away from him, Sasuke could still _feel_ the terror coming from the girl's words. Perhaps, because the same feeling was slowly but surely consuming him; his rage and hatred were subsiding as the reality of the situation started to sink in.

Despite knowing he would regret seeing with his own two eyes the result of his failure to avenge the Uchiha clan, Sasuke willed his body to turn around. What he saw was Naruto, impaled by Itachi's tanto.

The wound on the blond's stomach was deep enough that the small katana went completely through him. Sasuke couldn't see it from where he was, but Sakura had a clear view of the bloody tip of Itachi's sword coming out of Naruto's back, his black shirt becoming even darker as his own blood stained it.

Said view didn't last long as Itachi quickly withdrew his weapon, allowing the boy's blood to flow freely from the wound. "I have no interest in you."

Apparently not satisfied, he proceeded to land a nasty roundhouse kick on the blond just before he was able to fall to the ground, sending him straight into the nearby lake instead.

Naruto couldn't help but remember when Kurenai pranked him with the tree illusion as he started to sink underwater. This time the sensation of cold was much stronger, and he also could feel painful, throbbing sensation in his stomach.

And that time, it was just a genjutsu. But considering what Kurenai had said about breaking free of illusions, there was no way that he was trapped in one. Between the cold from the water and the burning from his wound, that would have been much more than enough to break him from the genjutsu.

'This... this is really happening...!' he thought as he started to suffocate from the water entering his lungs. Naruto struggled, but he failed to recover his balance and kept sinking into the lake. _'This is real!'_

Meanwhile, Sakura could do nothing but cry and watch as Sasuke was starting to break down, physically and emotionally.

"You... you _bastard_! I... will... kill—"

He started coughing up a lot of blood, interrupting his own speech, but he still kept glaring at Itachi the entire time, his fury clear as day. Itachi apparently didn't care about either fact.

"I suppose one of your broken ribs has punctured your lung. Hn. It doesn't matter," the man stated nonchalantly, "You are going to die here regardless. That's what happens when you blindly charge at someone much stronger than yourself."

"Shut up! I... won't die to the likes of you... not like this! I... 'll avenge—!"

Sasuke was once again stopped, but this time because Itachi had quickly appeared next to him and punched his face with enough force to break skin and the bone beneath it. The boy felt at least one of his teeth going down his throat, only for it to be regurgitated alongside more blood a few seconds later. His damaged jaw and cheekbones weren't making the process easy or painless.

"You are not in a position to kill anyone, little brother... but I am." Doing a long sequence of hand signals in only a few instants, he inhaled air as he casted his technique, "Lighting Release: Lighting Dragon Bullet Jutsu!"

"No! Stop!" Sasuke wheezed as he tried to get up. However, his body was simply too damaged for him to support his own weigh, and he found himself unable to do anything except watch his brother's technique being released.

Itachi took a deep breath and exhaled, not air, but a great stream of electricity in the shape of a dragon's head, aimed straight at the lake. Itachi didn't need to actually strike Naruto to kill him with that move; everything that was underwater would die from the electrical discharge instantly.

And as much as they wanted to close their eyes and turn away, both of the remaining members of Team 7 watched helplessly as the lighting construct crashed into the lake. The orange idiot was resilient, but there was no way he'd survive what was essentially a direct hit from an A-rank Raiton jutsu.

" _This_ is what it means to kill someone."

This time Sasuke didn't turn to look at Itachi, and instead he only stared emptily at the lake. With a flash of light, Naruto was gone.

Sasuke had always called Naruto a loser... but as much as he wasn't willing to admit it, he was starting to warm up to the energetic blond. Perhaps one day they might have been truthfully best friends, but now, he would never find out what could have been born from their bond, because Naruto was gone. And it had been his fault that Naruto died.

"Perhaps if you had cooperated with him or the girl instead of trying to take me down by yourself, he might not have died," Itachi suggested, subtly reminding Sasuke that there was another person at the scene. The younger Uchiha searched for his only living teammate, the loud wails that still rang throughout the clearing indicating that she was still present.

Soon enough, his eyes landed on her just as she turned away from the lake, unable to keep staring at what was effectively Naruto's grave. But in trying to avert her eyes from where one corpse rested, she came face-to-face with Kurenai's body, which only made her cry harder as she was reminded of the fact that she would soon join then.

Sasuke's rage suddenly spiked from seeing the girl breaking down like that, but this time confusion was mixed with the feeling. "...Why?" he asked weakly, his consciousness starting to fade thanks to the loss of blood from his internal wounds.

But he resisted it, using his fist and what little remaining strength he had to pound the ground in frustration and defiance, if only to help him focus as a new wave of pain hit him from the exertion. Sasuke flinched, but he did not close his eyes, making eye contact with his brother for what he expected to be the last time.

"Tell me..." Sasuke pleaded, crimson liquid falling out of his mouth as he spoke and stared at a pair of similarly colored orbs. _"Why!?"_

If he was going to die there, without being able to avenge the Uchiha clan... Fine. Then so be it. But he at least wanted to know why it had come to this; what had happened to his kind, gentle big brother to make him end up like that.

Though Sasuke's top priority had always been killing Itachi, the fact that he had changed so much to begin with had always bothered the younger Uchiha. He had thought that if he could kill Itachi, then that wouldn't matter... but as he came to grips with the reality that he had failed and that Itachi was going to finally finish what he started all those years ago, Sasuke realized that he would never rest in peace if he, at the very least, didn't get the answer he sought.

He _needed_ to hear it from Itachi's own mouth before letting go and accepting his death.

"Why... what, exactly? Why did I kill your teammate? Your teacher? Our clan... and our parents?"

That was not exactly the question Sasuke wanted to ask, but the boy was unable to form another word. However, Sasuke also had interest on what Itachi was about to say... and perhaps that knowledge would be enough for him to finally let death take him.

"Simple... it was because I could." The elder Uchiha said emotionlessly, his hands slowly forming hand seals in preparation for a jutsu that Sasuke was very familiar with. "Because you let me. You couldn't stop me back then when I wiped out our clan. You were weak then, but I gave you the chance to grow stronger..."

Stopping his signs with the one he had started out with, the Tiger, he said his parting words to the young Uchiha. "But you foolishly wasted the opportunity I gave you by closing yourself to the world around you instead of pursuing a greater strength and forming bonds with others. You are alone again, Sasuke, and you are going to die that way—just as powerless as you were when I left."

Not satisfied with the answer, Sasuke tried to move away, to say something... but he found that his body no longer obeyed him. With the adrenaline of his bout with Itachi dying down, he no longer had the strength to keep fighting, as the damage he took from his small fight with Itachi coupled with the fact that he had already been winded from Kurenai's training beforehand finally caught up with him.

Still, in the back of his mind, he noticed Sakura was gone from the clearing. In the end, he felt relieved from knowing that the girl who seemed to like him so much, even if a good part of what she felt was superficial, was not there to watch his last moments. He didn't need to burden her with that sight or risk having her pursuing the same path of revenge that he had followed after he witnessed the death of his parents through his brother's Tsukuyomi... and now she also had a chance of surviving, however small.

"Goodbye, Sasuke. Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu!"

The last thing the boy saw was a huge meteor-like sphere of pure fire coming towards him, seemingly in slow motion. The light was far too strong for him to keep looking at, so he simply closed his eyes and waited for his death, hearing the noise of the destruction the flames left in their wake. He only hoped that his parents and his clan would be able to forgive him for failing to avenge them... but at least he wouldn't be alone anymore.

And then, silence, followed by a burst of heat hitting him... but not from the infernal flames of Itachi's jutsu. No, it was something more... comforting. Familiar. Sasuke recognized the sensation, to a degree but... it had been so long ago that he had forgotten what that felt like.

He opened his eyes, only to see that he somehow was on his feet again, with a bundle of pink in front of him, hugging him tightly. Her hands and the area of his back that they were touching were very hot for a few instants before they cooled down and returned to their normal temperature—evidence that she had been sending her own chakra into him.

The fact that her shoulders were shaking uncontrollably and the few sniffs that he heard coming from her were the only evidence that she was still crying; at least until she started to speak again. "It's over, Sasuke-kun...! It's over...! He... your brother... he... was never here!" Sakura stammered in-between sobs as she kept crying and tightened the hug.

The whole situation shocked him enough that his mind was drawing a complete blank, though his heart and lungs both were working considerably more than usual as a result of the intense emotional stress he had just experienced.

After only a few seconds, Sasuke calmed down enough to take control of his body again, but Sakura didn't. Normally he would push her away immediately, but from the way she was clinging to him, repeatedly muttering something that sounded like "we are still alive", he began to understand how the situation had affected her.

Knowing how much he would have appreciated if someone had been there for him on that day when he had been the one watching helplessly as those close to him died by Itachi's hands, Sasuke returned the hug.

"Yes... we are safe now," he spoke with an uncharacteristic soft tone, hoping to reassure Sakura, and himself, that everything was truly alright.

Eventually, Sakura calmed down and slowly released him. She morosely walked away from the Uchiha much to his confusion... and surprisingly enough, disappointment. Sasuke would have been lying if he said that he didn't enjoy the contact, but not because of any form of romantic feelings he might have had for the girl.

The sensation of comfort that Sakura's hug gave him was something he hadn't experienced ever since the day of his mother's death. That had been years ago...

Partially snapped out of his trance now that Sakura had let go of him, he followed her movements with his eye until she eventually stopped in front of a passed-out Naruto. Crouching to the blond's level, she put a hand on his shoulder and flared her chakra. Seconds later, the blond woke up, gasping desperately for air until he realized with much confusion that he no longer was deep underwater, suffocating.

It was at that moment that the truth of what had happened during these past few minutes finally sunk in for Sasuke.

 _'It... it was all a genjutsu...!'_

And there was only one person who could have been responsible for such a thing... but why?

* * *

A/N:

I wonder how many of you thought I actually made a typo on the chapter's title...

Hopefully you guys now understand why I didn't put Kakashi vs Team 8 in the previous chapter. I wanted to have both fight scenes together so that you guys wouldn't be too starved from the lack of action, not to mention that Chapter 3 would have been far too big if I had put the first fight there. That, and I can better hook people into looking forward to Team 7's final part of the training.

Still, while I was a dick and didn't truly finish the fight I had promised for this chapter, I gave you guys another fight that I'm sure you never thought would happen at this point of the story, which I hope made up for it.

Well, okay, it was just only a genjutsu, and the kids weren't good enough to make this an actual fight since "Itachi" was just toying with them. With giant dragons and enormous fireballs. What a funny guy. (In his defense, I'm sure most kids would find that pretty awesome to watch if the techniques weren't aimed at them or their loved ones. Itachi was just a little bit misguided). Still, I guarantee you that Kurenai has plenty of reasons for doing what she did. The next chapter will explain it all!

Well... changing subject a little...

The prologue arc will be over in the next update, which will have 2 chapters. In chapter 5, you can expect the explanations for this chapter's oddities and cliffhangers. What was Kurenai's reason for putting Team 7 into a genjutsu involving Itachi of all things? How will Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura react to it? Was Kakashi able to fend off Shino and Kiba or were the bells taken? Why was his test so different from the normal one? And what about Hinata's fainting?

Ah, forgive me for bringing up the last one. You guys likely won't be too curious about her fainting, but it's far more important than it seems. Oh, we will also see both teams meeting up at the Academy to get their "C-rank" mission from Hiruzen and meet their client, Tazuna, which will bring about some more funny/lighthearted moments like the non-theoretical parts of Kurenai's training in Chapter 2. Outside of that, Chapter 5 will be more along the lines of Chapter 1 and 3... But the following one will not.

Chapter 6 is all about the group lunching and training together, and it's another Hinata-centric chapter. We will start to see the impacts of what Kurenai is trying to do with Team 7, and we will also see how successful Hinata will be when dealing with Naruto. But she won't be alone, because her newest friend, Sakura, will be there to back her up! Even if it means goading Hinata into sparring against her crush... hmm. I wonder how that will play out...

And after that, on chapter 7, the Wave arc will officially begin! I won't be altering its major events too much, if you think of the bigger picture, but the focus of the arc will shift to the genin's development as people and as ninja instead of the problems of Inari and the people from Wave. Also, _fight scenes_...

Anyways, please remember to review the fight scenes! You don't want me to suck at them if you are going to keep reading this...! To be honest, I am fairly confident that they don't suck, though I'm sure that they could be improved massively. But I'm the author so what do I know? I can't be unbiased about this.

See ya in three weeks!

(As a little extra, there are two awesome fics being referenced during this chapter: **Team 8** by **S'tarkan** and **A Growing Affection** by **Xavon Wrentaile**. See if you can spot the references!)

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.1 (12/29/2015)

Fixed an incomplete sentence regarding Kakashi's use of the Fuuton: Kage Bunshin no Jutsu. Thanks to _Perentie Fan_ for pointing that ridiculous mistake for me. I feel so stupid...

1.1 to 2.0 (07/10/2016)

Fixed typos, incomplete sentences, formatting issues, changed some words and added a little, little bit of extra content in some places


	5. Chapter 5 - Bonds, part 1

Hey there!

I am sure that most of you read the end of the last chapter and were wondering a lot of things, like what in the world Kurenai was thinking when she decided to use the Itachi genjutsu and how that event affected/will affect Team 7. This chapter is where I will answer those questions and help you see where I want to go with Team 7 in this fic.

There is also the deal with Kakashi's test and Hinata's fainting... let's tackle those two issues first, shall we? There is much to do before the teams meet up in the last part of the chapter.

Also, since I can't PM people who don't have an account on this site, I'll just use this little space to answer to a guest review. (And to call out every other guest ever: create an account! It's easy, fast, and let authors communicate with you directly! There are no downsides to making an account!)

Your review was a little bit messy so... I am not confident that I fully understood your concerns but, here goes nothing: I don't get why you would say that Hinata is ruining Team 7's bonding. If you meant to say that her parts of the story so far have been taking away from Team 7's, remember that I told you in the summary that Hinata would become a main character in the story. You were warned. Since Team 7 got some development prior to this fic's starting point and Hinata's original debut hardly gave her any focus before she got her character development, I needed to spend some time with her to make the readers know how her better and understand what her character development will be dealing with (as that will be covered more profoundly throughout the story).

Hinata will also be dealing with Sasuke and Sakura at times and will be important in helping the two of them understand Naruto better early on. While this story will be primarily Naruhina-focused, that doesn't mean I will be shunning the team bonding for Hinata's sake unless the situation calls for it. If you hate Sasuke/Sakura, I still hope that you stick around to see how they will be developing differently this time around, both individually and as a couple. I think that you will like the Team 7 part of the chapter, too, and especially the last part of the next chapter.

Without further ado, let's get started!

* * *

 _The Prologue_

Chapter 5: Bonds, part 1 (Current Version: 2.0)

* * *

 _'Ugh...'_

Hinata regained consciousness very slowly. Before she even had the chance to open her eyes, a strong headache made its presence known to her. The pain quickly got rid of any drowsiness she might have still had, but it also made her very unwilling to open her eyes just yet.

 _'I won't be able to go back to sleep at this rate,'_ Hinata lamented, wincing from the painful throbbing in her head. The poor girl had just woken up, but she definitely felt far too worn out to get out of bed and move around just yet, so she tried to ignore the pain and see if she could maybe fall asleep again.

Slowly, Hinata started to notice details that contradicted her idea that she was in her bedroom, such as the fact that she was sitting on some sort of grassy area or that her head was supported by something much harder and rougher than her soft pillow. But only when the girl finally realized that she was wearing her mission clothes rather than her sleepwear that she decided to finally open her eyes, and the first thing she saw after getting used to the light was a trio of wooden posts in the middle of a clearing, her bag resting atop the leftmost one.

 _'This... this is Training Ground 3!'_

Her mind now working as it should have, Hinata easily remembered why she would be in that place. Looking down and behind her shoulders, she recognized that she was sitting up on the grass, against a tree just on the edge of the clearing. What was notable, though, is that her clothes and the bits of skin that weren't covered by her pants and sandals were very, very dirty. _'Someone must have pulled me out of that hole in the ground... I guess?'_

Hinata didn't remember being buried per se, but the memory of Kakashi disappearing underground and Kiba warning that he was coming for her was still fresh on her mind. But before she could wonder more about the hole in her memories or the literal hole she had been in, she heard a shout coming from somewhere nearby.

"Hah! I've got you now, Shino!"

Recognizing a familiar voice mentioning an equally familiar name, Hinata turned her head and narrowed her eyes to focus on the blurs that were to her far left.

The blue-haired girl saw was her two teammates in what seemed to be a simple sparring match, with Akamaru calmly resting on the grass a few meters away, watching the brawl with interest. Kiba was dashing towards the aforementioned Aburame, his fist closed in preparation for a decisive hook aimed at his prey's head. Landing that blow was sure to win him the fight and make Shino regret trying to uppercut him seconds ago and leaving himself open—a bold move that Hinata had barely been able to witness.

However, the Inuzuka's sparring partner reacted faster. Shino pivoted in the same direction the Inuzuka was punching from and leaned slightly backwards, effectively avoiding the blow. Seeing that his opponent's own attack left him off-balance, the bug-user exploited the opening and buried his knee into his friend's abdomen.

It wasn't a really strong blow, but it floored the Inuzuka just the same. Kiba rolled on the ground, clutching his stomach with one hand while he pounded the grassy surface with the other, though whether it was more out frustration or pain Hinata wasn't sure. "S-shit...! Dammit, why the hell does everyone keep hitting my belly like that!?"

"That's because you are too eager to deal a finishing blow to your enemy's head to end the fight quickly. Your attacks are too telegraphed and leave yourself vulnerable," the Aburame answered stoically. Hinata noticed that he was a bit dirtier than the last time she saw him, but he was easily the cleanest of the Team 8 genin and unless Kiba won their next bout, which started as soon as the Inuzuka got up, he would still hold that title by the end of their training.

"That boy..." A deep voice said, coming from the girl's right. Hinata quickly turned her head and saw the jonin that was fighting against her team previously, Kakashi Hatake. He was leaning against a tree right beside the one that Hinata was propped up against and seemed to have been watching the fight up until that point. "I believe that during our test he got kicked in the stomach at least three times. I thought that he would've noticed his weakness by himself, but it seems I hoped for too much. At least now he knows what he's doing wrong." The cyclops then looked down at her. "So, you have finally awakened. Are you feeling alright?"

"Y-Yes, I... I think so. Well, I do have a... light headache, but outside of that, I'm okay." She answered shyly, downplaying her pain in order to not worry the jonin too much.

"So I was right..." Kakashi mumbled cryptically.

While Kakashi seemed to have found answers, Hinata was left only with more confusion. "Um... e-excuse me, but... what happened?" the girl asked, choosing the broadest question she found simply because she had no idea of where she should start to try and make sense of her situation.

"Well, from what you told me and from what I saw, I'd say that you passed out due to a mild case of chakra exhaustion. That little trick you did when you—willingly—got caught by my Headhunter Jutsu apparently used too much of your chakra. You have been out for almost an hour now. And so are my hands, actually," he noted with disgust. _'I still can't read my book...'_

Kakashi's answer greatly surprised Hinata. The girl knew she hadn't been even close to depleting her chakra reserves, but then again, she had never paid much attention to those since her techniques used only small amounts of chakra. _'If his hands are still numb, then I really used more chakra than I should've,'_ Hinata theorized, dubiously. From Kakashi's choice of words, it was clear he knew almost as much as her, so she decided to move on from that subject. "And... w-what about Shino-kun and Kiba-kun?"

"Ah, those two. They made decent use of the opportunities that your "sacrifice" gave them, but sadly for them, jonin don't need their hands to fight against mere genin." Kakashi turned to watch the two boys sparring against each other once again.

The problem with fighting only with your legs is that most of your attacks compromise your balance and your ability to dodge. Of course, there are quite a few advantages to kicking people, but relying solely on it is somewhat troublesome; especially if you are on the defensive. However, the skill gap between Kakashi and the genin was far too wide for them to make the most out of those weaknesses, especially since the older man out-ranged them.

"They did come close to catching the bells a few times," he added, "but once they noticed that you were passed out they lost their focus. I then decided to end the test to see what happened to you." Of course, the two genin weren't the only ones that got worried about what happened to Hinata. Kakashi had no problems with stopping the test early, especially since he already had the results he was looking for.

Hinata, however, hadn't.

Kakashi had been, once again, somewhat vague with his answers... but the girl could reasonably draw two conclusions from what he had told her. The first, was that Shino and Kiba didn't get the bells... and the second, was that it was ultimately because of her attempt to help them that they didn't pass. _._

In other words, they failed the test and it was _her fault_ that they did.

The silver-haired jonin knew that Hinata was a quiet person, but he was expecting her to say at least something in response to his words, so after a few seconds of silence he turned to look at her... and much to his surprise, he saw that the girl's shoulders were trembling and that her eyes were sparkling, filled with tears that refused to fall just yet.

Before he had the chance to ask what was wrong, she faced him and started to talk rapidly. "I... I... d-don't send Kiba-kun and Shino-kun back t-to the academy! Please!"

 _'...What?'_ Kakashi stared dumbly at the girl as she quickly rolled up the dusty sleeve of her coat and wiped her eyes using her bare forearm. This time, however, she didn't try to look at him again and merely stared at her own feet, trying to hold back any new tears that were threatening to fall.

 _'This doesn't make sense,'_ Kakashi thought. _'She had agreed with Shino when he explained what the test was about earlier, so why is she reacting like this?'_

"I-I-I know that... they didn't g-get the bells!" Hinata's shaky voice was barely audible as she dedicated a good part of her focus to controlling her nervous stutter, but the tightness of her throat made that a much harder task than normal. "But... please!" she begged, "don't take them out of Team 8!"

Kakashi frowned. He was starting to understand what the girl was trying to do and he didn't like where she was going with this. Her wording gave her away, but he decided to push her a little further to confirm his theory. "... And what about yourself? Don't you want to stay on Team 8 too?"

"I do! I-I really do!"

And how could she not? Team 8 was all that she had nowadays, of course she wanted to stay with them!

Maybe it was because she had been neglected for over half of her life, but to Hinata, the other three members of Team 8 were family. They were precious to her and she didn't want to lose them... but she knew what had already come to terms with what was going to happen now.

Taking a deep breath, she looked at Kakashi again and decided to help her friends in the only way that she could at the moment. "I... I-It's my fault that they failed so... I deserve to—"

"Ok, stop right there. I've heard enough from you," Hinata flinched from the sudden interruption, and Kakashi decided to derail the conversation before things got out of hand. Softening his voice in hopes of making the girl a little less nervous, he continued. "I was waiting for you to wake up so that I could inform you three of you about my conclusions, and I think we've waited for long enough. Stay there and pay careful attention to what I'll be saying."

Kakashi turned away to call the boys, but changed his mind and looked at Hinata again. "Actually, take a minute to calm down. You don't want your friends to see you so down, do you?"

Hinata remembered what happened earlier when Shino had approached her after they were separated from each other. The Aburame was discreet and it was unlikely that he had shared anything about their conversation with Kiba, but if he saw her breaking down again he would undoubtedly ask questions... which would prompt Kiba to do the same. Being interrogated by a stubborn Inuzuka wasn't something Hinata really wanted to deal with. Maybe without the threat of her team disbanding and that annoying headache she could have handled them, but right now? Not a chance.

Moments later, once Kakashi saw that Hinata had recomposed herself to a degree, he whistled loudly from under his mask in order to call the boys. Both of them immediately stopped fighting once they heard the whistle.

"It seems Hinata has awakened. I believe that we can stop sparring now," Shino spoke flatly, using the interruption to adjust his slightly crooked sunglasses as he looked at where Kakashi was.

"Whew... it's about time. I was starting to get worried." Kiba said, wiping the sweat from his brow. "Let's go greet her, Akamaru!" Kiba glanced around, searching for his partner, but he found no signal of his puppy where he had been previously.

Akamaru hadn't wasted any time. As soon as the ninken heard Kakashi's whistle and saw that the Hyuuga was awake, he ran as fast as he could towards her, and once he was close enough, he jumped on Hinata's lap and started to lick her cheek repeatedly, his tail wagging wildly as he did so.

The girl couldn't help but giggle at the dog's antics. "I'm happy to see you too, Akamaru." It seemed like he was worried about her, too... or maybe he had somehow detected that she wasn't feeling happy? Either way, she rewarded Akamaru's show of affection by patting him on the head.

"Oi, Akamaru! You can't do that to her, she still might be hurt!" The dog gave a bark of protest but obediently got out of the girl's arms and waited beside her, knowing his master would be there soon.

"It looks like she has recovered, however," Shino offered, defending his friend's partner. Akamaru was part of the team after all.

"Yeah, but what if she hadn't?" The boys quickly arrived near the girl and Kakashi, and Kiba immediately started to scold his pet. "Akamaru! What have I told you about running away from me to do stuff I haven't told you to do? This is why we got late today in the first place!"

The ninken whined guiltily, knowing it had done something bad. Luckily for him, though, Hinata was there to save his bacon. "Don't be mad at him, Kiba-kun..."

Akamaru barked in agreement, then the Hyuuga started petting him again, much to the dog's absolute delight and his owner's annoyance. Kiba then started to complain about Hinata spoiling him too much, but Kakashi quickly interrupted the boy so that they could actually get started.

Once they were silent, he motioned for the boys to sit down near Hinata, who had yet to move since she was still feeling sluggish and tired. "First, I want to talk about the point of the test. As Shino correctly assumed earlier, this was primarily a teamwork test. Your objective was to cooperate with each other to get the bells from me, even if my initial instructions suggested that you had to work against your teammates."

"...But if teamwork is the point of the test, then what is the exact reason behind separating us in the beginning? In particular, the methods used to achieve said goal?" Shino questioned, finally able to ask what was... bugging him, for the past two hours or so. "You split us up in a rather interesting fashion, but you could've just ran away like you did after we rescued Kiba."

"About that... well, I had to adapt my test to your team." Kakashi answered, lazily scratching the back of his head. "You see, this is the test that I use to see if the squads assigned to me are truly ready to start their career as ninja or if they still have to spend more time at the academy. But the test is designed around an assault squad, not a tracking one, so I altered it to test that aspect of your team a little."

Hinata then realized that this is why she had been close to the lake after being "kidnapped" by the kage bunshin. Her Byakugan wasn't developed enough for her to track Kakashi from that spot, but she could've followed the lake's border until she reached the other side of the clearing.

"There is also the fact that you three have already bonded with each other. If I had let you three stay together from the beginning, you'd have figured the point of the test too easily." Kakashi glanced at Kiba. "And since you and Akamaru already would have to work together, I couldn't let you get to me first. That would have just given away the test's true purpose to the other two..." He then shifted his gaze to Hinata and Shino. "But you two appeared after Kiba reached me, and together even. Why did that happen?"

"Hinata and I were simply discussing the test. I had been curious about a few aspects of the test and sought her out to see what she thought about it." Shino left out the details about his initial conversation with Hinata, and from the way her expression changed from tension to relief, Shino knew that he had made the right choice.

But while Shino was pleased with the answers he was getting, Kiba, who didn't care much for the test's purpose and oddities, wasn't as happy. "So... have we passed or not? I'm not really getting this," he grumbled. _'I'm pretty sure he could've gotten his point across with a simpler, less confusing test.'_

Kakashi was very clearly smiling through his mask. "In my opinion, all of you passed this at the moment when you three decided to fight me as an unit rather than individually."

"W-what...?! B-b-but wait, what about t-the bells?!" Hinata stuttered loudly, the shock of actually passing _together_ with her teammates making her lose control of her own voice in more than one way.

The jonin lightly tapped the round objects strapped to his hip. "These bells were there to give you guys an objective. A winning condition that is tied to a punishment for failure: the risk of being sent back to the academy. Both of those points were lies—in this case anyways."

"Why would you do that?! That's not... uh, I mean..." It was not every day that Hinata raised her voice to match Kiba's usual volume, but the words were out of her mouth before she could've thought about holding them in. And now everyone was staring at her as if she had grown a second head.

Still, even as she tried to make herself as small as possible in an attempt to not draw more attention to herself, the uncharacteristic frustration evident in her tone and expression had been enough to keep everyone's eyes on her. But before Kiba could question his friend's unusual behavior, Kakashi started talking again.

"A ninja must be able to see through deception." Kakashi's voice now had a certain edge to it that made the three kids feel uneasy. "I was deliberately vague and left hints for you three to work it out because you need to be prepared for situations where the enemy will try to fool you, in combat or otherwise. If you can't detect their lies, you will inevitably fall into a trap and die, possibly bringing down your whole squad with you."

Kakashi stopped talking, leaving the genin to reflect on his words. All of them had fallen for his tricks at one point or another, and each realized just how badly the situation could have gotten if they had been fighting a real opponent. Shino, in particular, was very disappointed with himself. Unlike Hinata and Kiba, his failure to correctly assess Kakashi's danger level when he was supposedly vulnerable would have also directly led to the death of both of his friends instead of just his own.

"So, uh... I have a question." Kiba, differently from his teammates, didn't dwell on his errors for more than a few seconds. "Why didn't you stop the test when we passed it?"

"Well... I wanted to see how well you three could work when fighting. You can consider the part that came after the true test as mere combat training. I wanted to see what you three could do together... and if it had been a test, despite not grabbing the bells, I'd say you guys passed with flying... ah." Kakashi stood awkwardly as he tried to do an encouraging thumbs-up but forgot that his hands were working as they should.

"Ah! P-Please, forgive me for hurting you like that..." Hinata quickly apologized, looking worriedly at the jonin once she did the math and understood why he had been staring at his hand in disgust earlier. _'I hope that he isn't angry with me...'_

"I told you to come at me with intent to kill, so it's alright", he waved her off. "This kind of thing happens sometimes. But this reminds me that I have to talk to you about a few things, alone."

"M-me?" Hinata pointed to herself, to which Kakashi simply nodded before facing the remaining members of team 8.

"Boys, wait for us on the Mission Assignment Room. Just don't bother those that are working there, ok?" Kakashi did not want a repeat of what happened when the Hokage offered to give his team (more specifically Naruto) a C-rank mission... and somehow, he had the feeling that today would be worse.

"Uh, alright," Kiba nodded. He was a bit uncomfortable with the idea of leaving his teammate alone after she had passed out suddenly like that, but he figured that the famous Copy Ninja would be able to help her more than him. "Shino, Akamaru, let's get going... oh, I'm gonna get Hinata's bag first," he added after his stomach grumbled mid-sentence, as if it wanted to remind Kiba that something important was about to be forgotten. And from the smell, Kiba was sure that whatever was inside the bag was _very_ important.

Once Hinata was left alone with Kakashi, she started to get anxious. "...W-what is it that you needed me for?" she asked, fidgeting with her fingers. She must have done something really wrong if he wanted to scold her privately.

"Let's see if you truly paid attention to what I said. What was the point of the bell test?"

"Uh... to see if we could work together...?" Hinata hesitated, unsure if the simple question wasn't more complex than it seemed.

"Exactly," Kakashi confirmed, much to Hinata's further confusion. "And would you say that _you_ were working together with your teammates during the test? Consider the fight as part of the test for the time being."

This time, Hinata took her time before answering. "Well... I think I did but... I-I'm not sure what you are trying to say."

Kakashi crouched to her level, staring at her sharply. The girl would have recoiled by sheer instinct, but since her head was still pressed against the tree trunk there was no escape. "You went along with Shino's plan to get the bells, but you didn't believe that his plan was correct like Kiba did, so you acted on your own to get a different result than what your teammates were expecting. In other words, you didn't trust them. And that's not what I'd call teamwork."

Hinata was taken aback by the jonin's accusation, but as much as she wanted to refute his point, she found herself unable to. Instead, she merely looked away from Kakashi's one-eyed stare, but the jonin wasn't done yet.

"Do you remember why Shino and Kiba couldn't get the bells from me?"

And how could Hinata forget the feeling of guilt that welled up inside her once she learned that Shino and Kiba failed to get the bells because they got worried about her? Sure, nobody was going to be sent to the academy, but she hadn't known that at the time. And even now that she knew that nothing bad happened because of it, admitting her own failure out loud was not easy. It only got worse once Kakashi informed her, after she nodded in acknowledgment of his question, that she became a distraction for her teammates and that they would have died because of it—because of her—if they had been fighting a real enemy.

Hinata could only hang her head low, too ashamed to face Kakashi at the moment. It was a good thing that she would have a few minutes before she had to see Kiba and Shino again, because she wasn't sure if she would be able to look at them right now.

"So this is my homework for you: learn to actually trust in your teammates. If you don't agree with your team then you need to talk them. And don't try to execute plans that go against the ones that your team decided." Kakashi's voice started out a bit soft, but ended up hard and unforgiving. "This is another thing that can get your whole squad wiped out. If your teammates are counting on you to do one job and you do another, you put the whole operation in jeopardy. Do you understand?"

The girl mumbled something that he decided to take as an affirmative. "And remember to avoid that move that you used to counter the Headhunter. You don't have the chakra capacity to use that, evidently. And... what was that anyways?" He had never heard of a Hyuuga doing anything even remotely similar to what Hinata had used, even after working with many of them throughout his career.

According to what Hinata then explained, all Hyuuga can naturally expel chakra from any of the 361 tenketsu of their body, but only in extremely small doses. With training, members of the Hyuuga clan could condition the chakra coils of their hands and palms to release more chakra in order to correctly use the Gentle Fist's techniques, but concentrating high amounts of chakra and releasing it all at once was another way to do that.

The problem with the latter method is that it requires a lot of focus in order to work, which makes it impractical for fast-paced taijutsu combat. It just so happened that Kakashi's jutsu was slow enough that Hinata had the chance to gather enough chakra to actually do some damage.

His curiosity sated, Kakashi then got up. Looking at the crestfallen girl, he wondered if he should ask about why she decided to risk her position on the team, but deciding that it wasn't really his problem, he decided to leave her be. _'I don't think she will talk to me, at any rate,'_ he reasoned with himself.

"Well, I suppose we are done here, so let's go. We do have a mission waiting for us after all." Kakashi moved to leave the training ground, but before he was even able to give a second step in the direction of the exit he heard Hinata let out a loud scream. Instantly turning around, he saw the girl clutching her left foot; her expression indicating she was in a great deal of pain.

"What happened?!"

"I... I... m-my foot is hurting. A lot." The girl answered weakly, not bothering to hide her pain this time. Hinata had tried to get up, despite still not really feeling like moving around, but as soon as she attempted to support her weight with her left leg a huge spike of pain shot up through the limb, focused mainly around her foot. Hinata had no idea of what the sensation of trying to walk on lava was, but she was sure that it wasn't dissimilar to how she felt in that moment.

"I-I don't think I can stand up if my other... um...?" She trailed off, somewhat confused when Kakashi suddenly got really close, turning his back to her and then lowering himself to her level.

"I'll take you to the academy's infirmary first, then. Since whatever you did to your legs also damaged my hands, I can't really carry you in another way. So climb on." Kakashi clarified. "I was going to need someone to fix my hands anyways," he added as an afterthought once he felt the girl's hands grab onto his shoulders. Thanks to said wound, more efficient ways of carrying the girl were out of the picture

Kakashi then got up and waited a few seconds for the girl to regain her balance. "Hang on tightly." That was the only warning he gave before quickly chakra-jumping towards their destination.

Hinata screamed once Kakashi started to pick up speed and she quickly changed her grip so that her arms would be around Kakashi's collarbone, but the man didn't mind, as he tried to close the distance between his current position and a certain rooftop from where he could just body flicker to the academy, a jutsu the he luckily had mastered long ago and no longer needed hand signs to execute.

 _'Her feet are hurting badly enough that she can't even walk? This can't be just chakra exhaustion...'_

* * *

"Seriously?! That was just a genjutsu?!" Naruto simply couldn't wrap his head around the notion that everything that had happened in those past few minutes... hadn't really happened. He glanced around, but the only Uchiha that he could see was Sasuke, who was staring at him cryptically. Kurenai was nowhere to be found.

"Yeah," Sakura confirmed, her voice still shaky. "It was nothing more—what the hell are you doing...?!"

"There's... no stab wound," Naruto constated, lifting his shirt to inspect his abdomen.

The pain of being stabbed, the cool edge of the blade deep inside him, the blood falling out, the cold water of the lake enveloping him and invading his lungs, and even Itachi's breathing when the man said to his face said he had no interest in him... that had been far too detailed for it to have been just an illusion. It was completely unbelievable.

"D-don't do that in front of a girl, idiot..." Sakura's first instinct was to punch Naruto, but seeing no evidence that Itachi's tanto had pierced him made her stop before she could actually go through with it.

Instead, she let out a sigh of relief. _'He... he truly is okay...'_ Sakura had been the one to break the genjutsu, but even she could hardly believe that everything hadn't been real, either.

"I don't get it..." Naruto muttered. "Why didn't the illusion fall apart when he stabbed me? Or when kicked me into the lake?" he asked Sakura, hoping that the smartest girl that he knew would have an answer for him. From Naruto's understanding, pain and cold were two things could've dispelled the genjutsu, and yet it had continued despite him clearly feeling these sensations.

But the one that answered his question was not Sakura.

"It seems I have been remiss in my teachings."

Much to the surprise of the trio of genin, Kurenai suddenly dropped from the sky, a small trail of leaves indicating that she had previously been on a nearby tree branch.

"Kurenai-sensei! You're alive!" Naruto smiled once he saw the woman approaching them, glad that the she wasn't dead like he had seen before. His smile, however, completely fell once he glanced at Sakura and saw the furious expression on her face.

Kurenai also noticed it, but for the time being she chose to ignore it. "The lake and the sword were part of the illusion. You would need to use your own body to harm yourself if you wanted to break the genjutsu using that method."

"Are you really going to stand there, talking about genjutsu and acting like nothing happened?! What the hell were you thinking?!" Sakura yelled, her entire body shaking with anger, one that was strong enough to provoke tears from her eyes. Naruto instantly got up from where he was sprawled on the ground and moved away from the girl, opting to go near Sasuke where it was much safer. He almost ran over the Uchiha in the middle of his escape, but surprisingly, the black-haired boy barely reacted to him.

Sasuke was just standing there, watching Sakura scream at Kurenai with a neutral, tired expression on his face. It was similar to his usual arrogant nonchalance, but the small differences in his features made the expression feel so out of place that Naruto started to feel worried.

"Uh, hey. You okay there, Sasuke...?" Naruto asked tentatively, unsure about how he possibly could help Sasuke. But there was no way he wasn't going to at least try, not after what he saw.

Sasuke merely glanced at him and nodded slowly before turning away to watch Kurenai and Sakura again, eliciting a frown from Naruto in response.

The genjutsu wasn't that much of a personal problem for Naruto. He didn't have a past with Itachi like Sasuke, he hadn't been consumed by feelings of fear and uselessness like Sakura and he definitely hadn't watched his own death like both of his teammates had. But Naruto could understand how those factors would greatly upset them. _'It was kinda messed up, but...'_

His experience with a certain water bottle led him to believe that Kurenai definitely had a good reason to do what she did. But while Sakura was out there, screaming about how Kurenai had no right to mess with a memory as traumatic as Itachi Uchiha was for Sasuke and for putting everyone thought such a cruel illusion... to Naruto, it made no sense that she was there _alone_.

Naruto imagined that Sasuke would have felt just as angry, if not more. He too agreed that the memory Kurenai chose was not to be messed with, however, Sasuke remained still as a statue, calmly staring at the two kunoichi. That confused the Uzumaki to no end. And it confused Sasuke just as much.

While Sakura had been traumatized by the experience, only now she had been given the opportunity to deal with her frustrations. Sasuke, though, had released _years_ of bottled up anger, hate and resentment in a single go and now... he was just feeling empty. Or perhaps numb would be a better way to put it.

Sasuke knew that he should've been really angry with Kurenai, but for the time being he was fine with Sakura acting in his stead. He wasn't truly paying attention to what she was saying, as usual, and was instead waiting for the girl to get everything out of her chest so that Kurenai could explain herself to Sakura. The girl had mostly taken the tree illusion as a prank, but Sasuke also realized that Kurenai probably had a reason to do what she did given how the water bottle incident played out.

"A-rank?!" Sakura's incredulous voice drew the attention of the two boys. "You used an _A-rank_ genjutsu on us?! Are you out of your mind?! We are _recently-promoted genin!_ Expecting mere novices like us to dispel that kind of genjutsu is insane!"

She then blinked once, her attention wavering once she realized what that fact meant. _'Wow. I... actually managed to break through an A-rank genjutsu...!'_ Sakura knew that she was good at using chakra pulses, but she had no idea that her skill with the technique was enough to deal with higher ranked genjutsu. Simpler genjutsu like those that Kurenai had taught to Sasuke and Sakura only lightly messed with the chakra flow of a single area, usually just the eyes or the ears, but the more complex illusions affected the entire body, so purging all of the foreign chakra in one go was much harder.

Kurenai easily noticed Sakura getting distracted and decided to capitalize on the opportunity. "Considering how you three performed earlier, I didn't expect that you'd be able to break a genjutsu as detailed as the Demonic Illusion: World of Nightmares," she admitted. "What made you discover that it was just an illusion?"

The pinkette crossed her arms in front of her chest and went back to glaring at the jonin. "You got too busy with Sasuke-kun's brother and forgot to manipulate your own corpse. The blood that was coming out of your forehead stopped flowing completely, but a small amount should have still leaked while... they were fighting." Using the pronoun "we" would be wrong, Sakura regretfully remembered. "Just... what kind of illusion was that anyways?" she asked. Angry or not, her desire to learn more never wavered.

Now Sasuke started paying attention again.

"The Demonic Illusion: World of Nightmares is a genjutsu that takes the greatest fear of the victim and makes it a reality. But unlike the Hell Viewing Technique that Kakashi used on you," Kurenai pointed at Sakura, "This one lets the caster spread out the illusion to people other than the initial target. It also can be controlled by the user to a degree, but that takes even more chakra than usual."

And that last bit had been news even for Kurenai.

She had never needed to hold back against enemy shinobi, so she was definitely surprised by how much it drained her reserves to keep Itachi from being excessively violent, and especially to make him ignore Sakura after he had attacked Naruto and to slow down his fire techniques.

"You're mistaken," Sasuke finally spoke, surprising both of his teammates who had almost forgotten that he was there thanks to how silent he had been. "I am not scared of Itachi."

"I agree," Kurenai concurred, much to the genin's surprise.

"Wait, what?" Naruto interrupted. "If it's not this... Itachi, then what was that genjutsu all about? I don't get this." The blond was now completely lost. If Itachi wasn't Sasuke's greatest feat, the illusion made no sense whatsoever. Glancing towards his teammates, he could see that both of them were just as confused as he was. _'Well, at least I'm not the only one. For once.'_

"That... it doesn't really matter," Kurenai said dismissively. She had also imagined that facing Itachi was Sasuke's biggest fear, but from how the illusion was playing out beyond her manipulations, it was clear to her that Sasuke had a completely different fear.

Sasuke feared that, despite all of his efforts to become strong, Itachi would still be able to take everything away from him.

Again. Just like he had done on that night all those years ago.

In a way, Kurenai had been glad that she was wrong. She thought that Sasuke truly didn't care about his teammates, but it seemed that the aloof Uchiha was warming up to them already _._ Though she wasn't sure if he was aware of it, Kurenai did know that it would make her job much easier.

"How can you say that it doesn't matter?! You can't be—"

"I understand that you are angry," Kurenai cut her off with a calm, commanding voice that was just loud enough to make Sakura stop talking, "but I assure you that I have good reasons for doing what I did. If you'd let me explain..."

She motioned for the genin to sit down on the grass.

Naruto shrugged and did so immediately, with Sasuke doing the same not too soon afterwards. Sakura still glared at Kurenai for a few seconds before begrudgingly mirroring her teammates and allowing the woman to explain herself. _'Psh. I really doubt her explanation will truly justify doing that cruel to us...'_

As she watched Kurenai sit down, the girl couldn't help but realize that her previous thought was a tad bit inaccurate. _'She has nothing to justify to me, only to Sasuke-kun.'_ Sakura could feel tears welling up on her eyes, so she quickly wiped them with her hands before someone could see her crying openly again.

Sakura was fully aware that the genjutsu only affected her as badly as it did because she was too scared to do anything. While she was definitely mad at Kurenai for doing what she did with Sasuke, what truly made her angry was that Naruto got killed, Sasuke got beat up until he was almost dead and... she only stood there and watched.

Kurenai had definitely been the cause of the first two events, but Sakura was sure that the last one wasn't part of the Genjutsu Mistress's illusion. That had been entirely Sakura's own fault and the girl knew it. And she was hating herself for it, despite the fact that, considering the circumstances, her reaction had been perfectly understandable, if not natural.

But since Sasuke wasn't going to be screaming at Kurenai for what she did, Sakura was glad to do it for him. He didn't stop her, at any rate, so he was _probably_ fine with it, but the Uchiha's expression was so neutral that Sakura couldn't be really sure about it.

And Sakura definitely didn't regret lashing out at Kurenai, even if the blame wasn't entirely on the woman's shoulders.

Her only regret was being too weak to do anything.

"Over the course of this day," Kurenai began, snapping Sakura out of her depressive mindset, "I have noticed quite a few problems with all of you, separately and as a team. Some of them affected you during the genjutsu, and others not so much, but many of those are grave issues that could directly or indirectly lead to your deaths on the field. Since we will be taking a mission that requires us to go outside of the village's walls tomorrow, I decided to deal with those problems while we are still in a safe place."

"Kakashi-sensei said we are taking only a C-rank, and we will have another team with us on top of that. Was this _really_ necessary?" Sakura hissed, still being as confrontational as she could.

"Is it really a C-rank, though? What guarantee do you have that we won't run into ninjas during the mission?"

"What? But that's—"

"Completely possible," Kurenai interrupted Sakura. "Listen carefully; all of you: One can _never_ be too prepared for a mission. You three need to learn that once you are outside Konoha, anything can happen. And I truly mean anything. Even an encounter with an S-ranked rogue ninja is not out of question, and considering that Naruto can use an A-rank ninjutsu like the Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu, it wouldn't be impossible to find an enemy genin or chunin able to use such a powerful genjutsu like the one I used either, would it?" Having no counterarguments, Sakura backed down and allowed Kurenai to proceed.

"And even if things go as planned you three could still get killed because of these problems. Kakashi believes that you three will eventually work out your problems if given enough time, but I'm not taking any chances." Of course, the real reason behind Kurenai's actions was that Team 7 wasn't going to embark on just a C-rank mission. Their mission was much more dangerous than that. If Kurenai could increase the chances of these kids coming back home safely, even if just by 1%, she would.

The woman's eyes then focused on Sasuke. "I believe I own you an explanation the most, so I will start with you. Before anything else, though, I'd like to say that I am sorry for messing with this kind of memory, and... I hope that you can forgive me for doing this to you." Kurenai bowed slightly to Sasuke, doing her best to ignore how Sakura rolled her eyes at her.

"If your explanation is good enough, consider yourself forgiven." Sasuke wasn't sure if he would still be calm if the woman's logic wasn't solid, though. _'So far, it's just paranoia.'_

"Thank you." Kurenai raised her head, a smile of relief forming on her lips as she did so. The woman was truly glad that he was still giving her a chance despite everything that had happened, and only hoped that Sakura would be willing to listen to her once it was her turn.

"My first problem with you, while the least likely to actually show up in tomorrow's mission, is also the most likely to get you killed. I am sure that one day you will end up facing your brother on the battlefield, but when the time comes, you can't charge blindly at him. Rushing at an opponent that is stronger, smarter, faster and more experienced than you is simply _suicide_ ," she emphasized. "You need to keep calm if you ever meet him, even when he undoubtedly uses what he did to provoke you. If you are weaker than your opponent, your only option is to win by outsmarting them, so you need to remain focused. And even if you get stronger than him, your anger will give Itachi a big advantage during the fight. You can't fall for his game—he will kill you for it."

"I know that." The bitterness in Sasuke's voice was almost palpable, and Kurenai was sure that his eyes would have told a similar tale had the genin had the courage to face anyone then. "But this is much easier said than done. After what he did to me and to my clan... to our family... I... I simply couldn't control myself."

"Part of the reason that you can't control yourself is because you are focusing completely on your hate. It's been the driving force of your life, and that's unhealthy, Sasuke. I won't ask you to stop hating your brother—I know that is pretty much impossible considering the circumstances... but maybe you should take a different path in your life."

"What are you suggesting?"

"Let me tell you about the other problem I have with you first. My answer will make much more sense afterwards." Kurenai almost smiled once she saw Sasuke scowling.

"The second problem... is your attitude towards your teammates. I understand that you think they are too annoying and not strong enough for you to bother with—and we are definitely going to talk about this first issue soon," Kurenai promised, shooting pointed looks at Sakura and Naruto, "but pushing them away and trying to do things by yourself will never allow this team to grow as it should. Both of your teammates have a lot to learn from someone as talented as yourself, but you too could get much stronger if you let your team help you. Just like the illusion of your brother said, if you had cooperated with Naruto you would have had better chances during that fight, even if they weren't high to begin with. But that's understandable, you three are just genin after all."

Kurenai sighed, seeing that Sasuke didn't look particularly convinced by her logic. "Going back to the first issue: Itachi Uchiha. I'm sure that you are painfully aware of this, but the gap between you two is immense. He was an ANBU captain before defecting, but you are just a genin. To be honest, considering the how talented he was, I doubt that anyone in Konoha other than the Hokage could be a match for him."

Naruto's eyes widened at that. "Is... is he really that powerful? Sasuke's brother, I mean?"

The blond knew the Hokage was the Konoha's strongest, and he also had an idea of how destructive the old man could be, despite his looks. After all, he needed to know just how awesome his predecessors were, so he had actually paid attention when tales of their exploits were the topic during the academy. Naruto noticed that Itachi was strong during their little "fight", but he had thought that it was just because he was an illusion. And now Kurenai was telling him that the man was just as strong as the Hokage? Naruto had his doubts.

"My brother was already an ANBU captain at our age, and he's seventeen years old now. He wasn't just a prodigy or the best of his class... he was the most promising ninja of his entire generation. A pure genius." Sasuke explained, refusing to look at the others in shame of being comparatively the dead last of his own family. Being just "Rookie of the Year" was a complete and utter joke in comparison to leading a squad of extremely powerful and deadly shinobi. And as Kurenai had just said, he was likely on par with Hiruzen Sarutobi already, if not better.

Had Sasuke looked at Naruto as he spoke, he'd see the blond's face paling considerably.

"Even if you get stronger than him, he will always have an entire decade of experience over you, won't he? But there is a way to even the odds in your favor," she said suggestively.

Sasuke sighed. Kurenai was looking at him expectantly (and so was his somewhat clueless male teammate), so he knew that it was up to him to actually say it. "You mean my team, don't you?"

The woman's approving smile was all the answer that he got. Looking at Naruto and Sakura's faces, he could only see surprise and disbelief, but if he were to be honest with himself... one day, those two just might be able to help him kill his brother. All three of them had a long way to go before being able to stand up against Itachi, but Kurenai was right: they had potential. Sasuke had always known that fact, but due to personal bias he refused to accept that.

Naruto was really bad at everything outside making shadow clones and proclaiming that he was going to be Hokage one day, but Sasuke could imagine just how scary the boy would be one day if he were to be taught proper taijutsu and more destructive techniques. Just learning how to think would've made wonders for Naruto's fighting ability, to tell the truth. _'He can improvise well, but that's not tactics.'_

And Sakura, despite her irrational behavior towards him, was an extremely smart person. She had no great skills to speak of, but she could definitely be a scary presence on the battlefield if her offensive capabilities were bigger. The girl was also gifted with an incredible talent for chakra control, and though Sasuke wasn't sure that she would be willing to work with Kurenai after today, he knew that the path of genjutsu wouldn't be that hard for her. _'And once I awaken my Sharingan, every technique that they learn will also be mine...'_

Maybe judging them based only on their current abilities had been a mistake. After all, wasn't he always considering how strong he would've been with the Sharingan? Shouldn't his teammates be regarded similarly, then?

"Moving on, Sakura, Naruto..." Both of them felt a shiver running down their spines from the nasty look that Kurenai was aiming at them. "Before I talk about you individually, I must address the other part of the team dynamics problem: the stupid love triangle that you three got yourselves tangled in."

Kurenai shook her head in disappointment. "As long as you don't lose your focus on your career, there is nothing wrong with trying to find love, even at such a young age. But you two are doing it wrong. If you want someone to love you, earn their friendship first! And if you want that friendship to blossom, then stop trying to push yourself at that person when they clearly don't want anything just yet!" Both kids looked away from Kurenai's eyes. Her red irises resulted in particularly powerful glares that were hard to withstand.

Sakura felt a strong attraction to Sasuke, but the boy was so aloof that she had no other idea on how to approach him outside of basically forcing him to see her. Naruto's issue was similar, but instead of just wanting to be noticed by Sakura, what Naruto truly wanted—even if he wasn't aware of it—was to win her from Sasuke.

But how could one blame them from acting so forcefully?

Few people still remembered how much of a timid flower Sakura was when they had just entered the academy. It wasn't until one Ino Yamanaka befriended her that Sakura started to act more like she currently does, and in many ways she acted similarly to her friend even today. Kids tended to emulate those around them in order to fit in, and seeing how Ino was liked by most people, Sakura started to unconsciously follow her friend's footsteps...

And if Ino threw herself at Sasuke whenever she could, then obviously, that was what Sakura needed to do to get the attention of the aloof Uchiha genius that enchanted her so much.

Naruto, similarly, knew no other way of getting what he wanted outside of acting like he did. It was only when he gave up on crying and started to be loud and demanding that the villagers stopped ignoring him, even if only to scream at him. And yet, his usual antics were not enough to get any of the females of the academy to even look at him. They were always—always—just focused on Sasuke, and though there was one exception, Naruto never once looked behind his shoulder to see that there was someone rooting for him whenever he and Sasuke had to spar against each other at the academy, during taijutsu classes.

Maybe things would have been different if he had noticed that a certain person was never looking at Sasuke, but Naruto's blue eyes were always focused on the mass of girls that surrounded the Uchiha. Shikamaru Nara frequently commented that dealing with that mob of fangirls would be very troublesome, but Naruto would have killed to get that kind of attention. So he tried to make himself known to the girls.

Maybe the people would look at him instead of Sasuke if he won the acknowledgment of the prettiest of Sasuke's fangirls? That's what Naruto thought at the time, and so, he set his sights on the beautiful Sakura Haruno.

She never seemed to want anything with him. But giving up never did anything for Naruto, so he continued trying, even today...

And now here was Kurenai, telling the two of them that they had been _wrong_ about what they have been doing all this time.

Naruto and Sakura quickly realized that the older woman was most likely right... but both had chosen their love interests relatively early in their lives and cared very little for other individuals of the opposite gender. So, considering that, how were they supposed to go about this "friendship" thing? Was just not trying to ask for dates or respecting their personal space good enough?

Kurenai didn't miss the lost expression on their faces, but she decided that this lesson is one they would be better off learning for themselves, because for every given combination of two people the answer to that question would be different. What she was going to tell Sakura next might help her, but in the end, the path she would take was up to her.

 _'As long as they don't bother who they are pursuing, for now that would be enough. The rest will come with time.'_ The woman then blushed furiously once her mind unwillingly remembered what "the rest" ended up being for herself and one Asuma Sarutobi.

Cleaning her throat and definitively not acknowledging Sasuke's questioning look, she proceeded. "Um, well. With that being said, let's move on to Sakura."

Despite the girl in question really not feeling like it, she still moved her head to meet Kurenai's eyes with her own green orbs. _'This better be good...'_ she grumbled, though as much as she wasn't going to forgive Kurenai anytime soon, she was already accepting the jonin's intervention.

"You are probably never going to have as much raw power as Naruto and Sasuke, but your role in Team 7 is even more important. Do you know what that is?" Sakura's bemused expression spoke for itself, and Kurenai didn't miss the girl wincing at her first sentence. "Your role, is to support your teammates. Both in the field and out of it"

"...What?" Sakura was definitely not the only one surprised by that statement.

Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura were part of an Assault Squad! How could "support", whatever that meant, be more important than shooting huge fireballs or creating an army of clones?

"Sakura, there are many things that the Hokage and your teachers consider before building a squad. One of the reasons you are here alongside these two," she pointed at the boys, "is because you are a relatively normal person."

"I don't get it." Sakura and Naruto answered at the same time, roughly.

"Sasuke and Naruto both have hard pasts that left them crippled emotionally. You saw that genjutsu, and while I can't go into details, know that Naruto has demons just as big as Itachi Uchiha is for Sasuke."

Naruto did his best to focus on Kurenai and ignore the weird looks that his teammates were giving him. He only hoped that the woman's vague statements wouldn't result in Sasuke and Sakura finding out about the Kyuubi.

He already had an entire village shunning him because of that. He really didn't need his teammates to be part of that group, especially not if they start working on improving their bonds with each other like Kurenai wanted them to.

"You, on the other hand," Kurenai continued her speech about Sakura, "have a much less turbulent life. This won't be for long; your career will inevitably leave you broken sooner or later—all of you—but your teammates don't have a family or friends to support them when they break. It might not look like it now, but they will need you to be there for them one day, and they will definitely be there for you when you need them. But if you don't start working on your bonds with them now, it might have... unpleasant consequences in the future."

Kurenai looked away, ignoring the trio's confusion. She didn't want to say it out loud, but she knew more than a few lonely ninja that couldn't handle the pressures of the job because they had nobody else in their lives. Some succumbed to mental illnesses, ranging from various forms of PTSD to downright insanity.

Others chose to use their kunai to take one last life before permanently retiring. She could only hope that Sakura would be able to pull Naruto or Sasuke away from such a dangerous edge if they ever came close to it.

The genin didn't realize right away what Kurenai was trying to say, but all of them silently decided that if it was bad enough that she wasn't willing to talk about it, it wouldn't be a good idea to find the answer when it's already too late to do anything about it.

Seeing that Kurenai had gone silent, Naruto thought that it was best to get their discussion back on track. If not, they would be late for lunch and Naruto wasn't going to let that happen. "So, um... you said something about Sakura-chan being our support when we are fighting... what was that all about?"

"Ah! Well..." The jonin took a moment to recollect her thoughts. "You and Sasuke are very reckless during battle, from what I observed, which means you are not going to get out of many taijutsu battles unscathed. Ninjutsu, on the other hand, often require a certain amount of preparation so that they can be used, so having someone with a defensive-oriented skillset would be more optimal for an assault squad than a third powerhouse would've been."

"You mean genjutsu?" Sakura asked.

"Not necessarily that. Your chakra control is good enough that you could be a great user of medical ninjutsu, and there are a few defensive ninjutsu that you could learn, depending on your affinity." And, sadly for Sakura, Kurenai knew the girl would be more-or-less locked to her affinity thanks to her small reserves and the additional chakra costs of using techniques from another element. "Other options could include supporting them at a range with projectiles like arrows, or perhaps poisons. Though that's not to say you can't go fight at the frontlines too. In the end the choice is yours; those were just a few specialties that you could opt to pursue."

Kurenai would leave Sakura to consider her path and move on to the next student, but there was no time for that, because Sakura had one more thing to listen to.

Finally, the woman turned to the last member of Team 7, ready to wrap up her lecture. "Naruto, most of what I had to say to you was already said at this point. We discussed before how you need to pay more attention, and how you need to be more careful when dealing with genjutsu earlier. There is only one thing left for us to talk about. This is something that affects you the most, but one day it might affect your teammates too, so I want everyone to listen to me closely."

Seeing that Sakura and Sasuke had their eyes on her, Kurenai continued, looking pointedly at the other member of the team. "We need to talk about envy. Naruto, from what I have been observing, you are not really satisfied with how you are lagging behind Sakura and Sasuke in many different areas, are you?"

Naruto would usually deny Kurenai's accusation by angrily exclaiming that he already was better than Sasuke, and probably throw a comment about him being Hokage someday... but he had a feeling that it would just make things worse if he tried to lie to her.

That didn't mean that he was going to openly confirm her theory, though. His scowl was the only answer he was willing to give to Kurenai.

"Your teammates being stronger than you means that they can help you catch-up, so you shouldn't feel bad about being weaker at something. Ask for their help, and help them in return when they need it. If you work _together,_ you will get stronger _together._ You three need to remember that there is no room for "I" in a shinobi squad." Kurenai then went silent, letting her words sink in.

 _'A specialty...'_ Sakura mused. Kurenai had given her many options, and she was sure that those weren't the only paths she could take. _'But I have no idea of what I want to do...'_

Letting out a silent, weary sigh, she glanced at Kurenai again. _'Genjutsu... this is the second time I became useless because of something that wasn't even real.'_ The girl unconsciously clenched her fists in frustration. _'I'm not going to let that happen to me again. Even if it means that I will have to put up with this person. Maybe learning a few for my own use wouldn't be too bad, but if what Sasuke-kun said is true then I can't choose that as my specialty. Itachi would just turn them against me when he and Sasuke-kun inevitably meet...'_

The girl looked at her pensive teammates, but not a single idea of how she could complement their skillsets came to her mind. Her gaze eventually settled on Naruto. _'Maybe I need to treat him better, too. He's not really a bad guy, just a little—'_

A loud gurgling noise resounded throughout the clearing.

"Oops..." Naruto scratched the back of his head sheepishly. "Guess it's time for lunch, huh? I could really go for some food now! I basically didn't have breakfast after all... that really sucked, you know?"

 _'...obnoxious,'_ Sakura completed her thought, looking at her teammate flatly as he continued to rant loudly about his hunger.

"It's your fault for being stupid and tripping on a rooftop," Sasuke retorted. Though his remark had much less disdain than usual, it was still there, and Naruto felt it.

Sakura's first instinct was to back Sasuke up, but this time she held herself back and stayed silent. Naruto, however, reacted like he usually did.

"What was that?! You jerk, just because you—"

"Hey!" Sakura's voice made both of the boys look at her. The girl hesitated for a second. "Listen, Sasuke-kun... Naruto is right. It should be close to midday anyways, so I think we should go... right sensei?"

"Right. I believe we are done for now, so let's go meet up with my team and Kakashi so that we can get our mission and then go have lunch," Kurenai smiled proudly at Sakura.

Sakura didn't return the smile and merely walked away. _'Support, huh...?'_

Naruto and Sasuke shared a glance, weirded out by how the girl's behavior had been completely opposite of her usual self. It took only a second for them to realize why she had acted like she did, and when they did, they broke eye-contact immediately.

"Sorry," Sasuke muttered, almost inaudibly.

The volume was more than enough for Naruto to hear him, but the blond wasn't sure that he heard it correctly. "Um, what did you say?"

Had the mighty Sasuke Uchiha just apologized to _him?_ The class clown? The dead last? The guy who failed the genin test twice? _'Wait, I got my headband after the test, so I actually failed three times... ugh.'_

"I said that I was sorry. Are you deaf or just that stupid?"

"Sasuke-kun..." Sakura didn't turn around, but her disapproving tone was enough to make Sasuke stop talking and make his way towards the training ground's exit.

Naruto, though, was still stuck in the same place, wondering what the hell had just happened. Then his stomach protested again, and Naruto quickly followed his teammates, with Kurenai walking right beside him.

 _'I am glad that they listened to me,'_ Kurenai thought. It would be a while before they fully realized their potential, but she could see that they were already trying.

"Hey, Kurenai-sensei. Where are we going to eat at anyways?" Naruto asked. He could only hope that the owner of whatever place they were going to wouldn't kick him out because of the Kyuubi, but his fears were put to rest by Kurenai's answer.

"Oh, most likely we are going to eat at the training ground that you three generally use. One of my students, Hinata, probably has made bentos for all of us. And look forward to it, because her food is delicious!" Of course, it was just a guess, but ever since their second day of training the shy Hyuuga had consistently made lunch for all of Team 8, so Kurenai was sure that Hinata was going to bring bentos for all ten of them. _'After such a draining genjutsu, I could definitely go for some food right now...'_

Kurenai's answer left Naruto confused. Team 7's members were announced before Team 8's, obviously, so he hadn't paid attention to that squad's members, and it didn't help that Naruto had never paid attention to the person Kurenai was talking about to begin with.

 _'Hinata... Hinata... oh, her! That plain, strange, dark girl with the weird eyes! So she's on Kurenai's team, huh?'_ Naruto frowned at that. _'Well, I don't know much about her, but if she's going to bring food for us then she can't be a bad person!'_ Between the Sandaime Hokage, Iruka and the two people that worked on Ichiraku Ramen (The owner and cook,Teuchi, and his daughter Ayame), Naruto tended to associate food with nice people.

 _'And if sensei is right, then there will be a boxed lunch made just for me!'_

Naruto smiled, but not too soon he dropped it. Shaking his head, he corrected himself. _'She probably made one for everyone. Mine will be nothing special... just like the one that I bought that one time.'_

Naruto still remembered the day when he had enough money to buy a fancy bento for himself. Other kids seemed very happy to eat food that their mothers had carefully made just for them, and Naruto had hoped that if he could eat one at lunch, he could imagine that it was his mom that had made it for him to make his day a little brighter.

He ate the food with a huge smile on his face, but it only made him more depressed.

 _'Maybe one day...'_

* * *

Hinata almost had a heart attack once she entered the Mission Assignment Room.

The first thing she had taken note of was that outside of herself and Kakashi, the entirety of Teams 8 and 7 were already inside, waiting near one of the corners of the room. And as soon as she and Kakashi entered, Sakura and Naruto pointed angrily at Kakashi and screamed "YOU'RE LATE!" in perfect synchrony.

Since she was right beside the jonin and was, in fact, the reason behind his tardiness, the shy girl had thought they were angry at her and immediately bowed low to apologize. Her position added to her low height and made her hair act as a blue curtain that kept her bright pink blush out of sight.

"S-sorry! I-I-I didn't mean to keep you waiting!" She desperately blurted out, not at all wanting to be the cause of her crush's anger. On the back of her mind she noted Sakura was mad too, but considering how she treated Naruto in the academy, Hinata wasn't caring all that much about how the pinkette felt.

However, she really didn't manage to speak loud enough to be noticed by the pair of enraged genin, though the other people in the room heard her apology somewhat (only the jonin, Kiba and the Hokage heard her fully).

"Honestly sensei, Shino and Kiba were here a good 15 minutes before you entered!" Sakura ranted, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

"Yeah, what's your excuse now, Kakashi-sensei?!" Naruto demanded. The pair's angry words made Hinata realize that she wasn't the target of their fury, so she quickly straightened up and looked away from them, feeling stupid.

"I could smell that you two were in this building before we even arrived. What gives?" Kiba questioned.

Kakashi gave them his usual one-eyed "I _really_ don't care" look but answered them anyways. "We were in the infirmary. After what happened during training, we both were in need of a check-up."

"And just what did you do to her that you'd need a nurse to heal her afterwards, Kakashi?"

Kurenai's volume hadn't been higher than usual, but her tone of voice clearly promised much pain and suffering if his answer wasn't satisfactory.

Kakashi didn't really look scared or worried, but the sudden movement of his Adam's apple gave him away. "I... think you are asking the wrong question, because I was only the victim here. Your student did a number on my hands, but her legs got injured in exchange."

This surprised everyone that was paying attention to the conversation.

Kiba and Shino were mostly concerned about their own teammate, as they weren't aware that Hinata wasn't fine. While Shino merely frowned, Kiba had to actually bite his tongue to not blurt out an "I told you she wasn't fine!" to the Aburame. That would just make the situation worse for Kakashi, and possibly himself, so he kept his mouth shut.

On the other hand, Team 7's genin focused mostly on the fact that Hinata, shockingly enough, managed to send Kakashi to the hospital (though Sasuke's expression didn't change much beyond the slight widening of his eyes).

 _'What?! HINATA of all people managed to injure Kakashi-sensei?! How's... how's that even possible...?! She couldn't even beat me or most of the class in the taijutsu tests!'_ Sakura thought incredulously, her pride still mildly wounded over not being able to do much against the jonin during their own test despite being considered the "Kunoichi of the Year" by their teachers. Her mind briefly returned to her equally pathetic performance against Itachi, but she shook her head before that depressing thought fully formed.

Unlike Sakura, Sasuke realized that Hinata had likely used the Gentle Fist to wound Kakashi. The academy didn't allow for it to be used, much like the Sharingan had also been banned (not that he ever managed to awaken it before his graduation), but if Kakashi had asked them to come with the intent to kill, then that restriction wouldn't exist anymore. _'Serves him right. I have no idea how she did it, but that's what he gets for reading porn mid-battle.'_

Naruto's reaction was similar to Sakura's, but with a different focus... and of course, he didn't actually keep his thoughts to himself. "You're saying that she got you good enough to send you to the hospital?!" he asked Kakashi, before turning to Hinata without even giving the jonin a chance to defend himself. "Wow! Awesome!"

Light pink gave way to crimson as the Hyuuga girl started to get dizzy. _'Oh my... he noticed me! He's_ _ **talking**_ _to me! What do I do now?! I don't know what to say!'_

But thankfully before Hinata could embarrass herself further by stammering an awkward response and possibly fainting from nervousness right afterwards like she usually did, her teacher crouched in front of her, effectively blocking the blond from her field of view.

Hinata had mixed feelings about that fact.

"Are you okay, Hinata? What happened back there...?" she asked, concerned. The girl only nodded absentmindedly in response to the first question before snapping out of her trance and stammering a yes and nodding more firmly, albeit nervously.

Kurenai had been worried about her student, especially since Kakashi's comment didn't make a whole lot of sense to her (or to any of the other adults in the room). The red, dazed expression that the girl had before Kurenai started to talk with her only made the kunoichi even more uneasy.

But before she could try to answer the second question, Kakashi was already speaking, vaguely. "I'll tell you later; you might be able to help me make sense of it. Don't worry too much, though." Finally, the silver-haired man turned to address his superior. "And I am sorry for taking your time, Hokage-sama," he apologized while bowing slightly.

The old man, who was smiling at the scenes that played before him, waved his hand dismissively. "Do not worry, Kakashi. Considering your usual behavior, you are actually quite early!" Hiruzen commented in good humor, before cleaning his throat and looking over the assembled genin. "Well then, moving on to business. I suppose you six are already aware of the joint mission that I have for you and the reason behind this arrangement, correct?"

Receiving a few nods and positive affirmations as an answer, Sarutobi picked up a scroll and held it in toward the two jonin. Kurenai, who had turned to face the older man when Kakashi mentioned him, was the one that stepped forward to grab the document. The Hokage then kept talking, openly smiling at the two teams of genin. "Now, I have no D-rank missions that would even remotely need six ninjas, especially with one of them being able to use shadow clones, but I do have a C-rank mission that you all—."

"FINALLY!" Naruto screamed, "No more stupid D-rank missi—ow!" Naruto stopped his commemoration to rub his recently-assaulted left ear.

"Quiet, Naruto! Don't get me in trouble." The boy pouted and crossed his arms, but did as Kakashi ordered him to.

Sarutobi just chuckled at the exchange, remembering that the boy's godfather, Jiraiya, had reacted similarly when it was he and the other Sannin that were there, receiving their first C-rank mission. The only big difference instead of an ear flick, he got punched (and knocked out) by his teammate Tsunade after the outburst.

"As I was saying, this C-rank mission shall be performed by both Team 7 and Team 8. Your objective is to safely escort your client, a bridge builder, back to his home in the Land of Waves, and later to protect him as he builds a bridge that will connect his country to continent."

"What kinds of enemies should we be expecting, Hokage-sama?" Shino inquired, visibly startling Naruto in the process. Shino noted with annoyance that the blond apparently had forgotten about his presence... or never noticed him in the first place. The Aburame didn't know which was the most vexing option.

"The only threats should be bandits, if anything... but you should be careful; missions sometimes change parameters. Be ready for anything." Hiruzen knew that, even if they took his advice seriously, they would probably never expect being attacked by chunin or jonin in their first C-rank.

Resisting the urge to sigh, he continued. "Now, it's time for you to meet your client." Sarutobi looked towards a male chunin to his left, who nodded and exited the room. In a few seconds, the chunin returned to his desk, frowning, and soon afterwards an old man with gray hair and beard entered.

His clothes were very simple: just a sleeveless brown shirt and tan shorts. He also had a large backpack strapped to his back, but what grabbed everyone's attention was that he was carrying sake bottle, and that he was visibly drunk if the red coloring his cheeks and the way he wobbled as he walked were evidence of anything.

Everyone frowned a bit once their noses detected the strong smell of sake coming from the man. The Inuzuka actually covered his, the stench being felt much strongly by him. Akamaru, however, had no way to avoid smelling the booze and just whined a bit from his otherwise comfy vantage point on the top of his master's head as he tried to imitate Kiba to no avail. Had the dog been able to think in the language of humans, some sort of curse followed by the wish to have thumbs would have passed through Akamaru's mind.

The newcomer stared at the group for a few seconds before turning to the village's leader. "You really weren't kiddin' when you said there would be six brats to protect me... you sure about that, old man?"

"We have already talked about this, Tazuna-san. You paid enough for one genin squad—I am giving you two. They are the best I can give you," he finished, scowling at the drunkard. Sarutobi really didn't need someone that was older than fifty calling him an old man.

The bridge builder's expression turned to match Sarutobi's. "They're the best you have? Bah... what a joke. At least there's some actual ninja and it's not just a buncha kids."

That ticked Naruto off. "Hey! We might not be jonin but we are strong ninja too! Especially me!"

Tazuna snorted. "You, pipsqueak? The one that's wearing BRIGHT ORANGE and still has the guts to call himself a ninja?!" Naruto looked ready to strike, which only made the man only laugh harder. "The other five are kids, but you must still be a baby! Ha! A baby with bright orange soiled diapers! Bwahahahaha!"

Kiba was really trying not to laugh at Naruto but he simply couldn't resist it after Tazuna's poor alcohol-induced joke and joined their client. However, it was Sasuke's low chuckle that was the last straw for the Uzumaki. He jumped, ready to throttle the drunk old man, but not before Kakashi could catch him by the collar of the jumpsuit that started it all.

"I. Will. Kill you! Bastard...! Ugh, Kakashi-sensei, let me go...!" The boy growled, struggling against Kakashi's firm grip.

The Aburame decided to intervene, verbally. "I believe killing our client would be unproductive, especially before we receive our payment."

Sakura could only raise her eyebrow at that. "So, killing him after we get the money would be ok?"

"That... was not what I meant."

"Sakura, please don't tease my student like that," Kurenai mumbled, rubbing her temples. "And Kiba, stop rolling on the floor!"

Meanwhile, Hinata was silently fuming in her own mind, partially from her lingering headache and partially from Tazuna's disrespect for their future Hokage.

 _'This man shouldn't be underestimating Naruto-kun just because of his clothes! How rude!'_

In the girl's _slightly_ biased opinion, Naruto was actually a really impressive ninja. After all, not everyone genin could boast that they had an A-rank kinjutsu on their skillset. And despite Naruto's orange-colored handicap, the boy had managed to outrun and outsmart many genin teams during his career as a prankster, to the point where the Hokage had to make "Catch Naruto" a C-rank mission just so that he could give it to chunin instead of genin. Of course, sometimes she made the situation worse for the poor ninja that were just doing their jobs by giving them misleading clues, but...

Eventually, after a few screams and scoldings, things quieted down in the office.

Wearily, Hiruzen gave one last command to his jonin. "Kurenai, Kakashi, please escort this man back to the hotel he is staying... as for you kids, you are dismissed." The Hokage then watched the lively group leave the room, hoping that it wouldn't be the last time he'd be seeing some of them...

* * *

A/N:

I guess we can stop here for a bit...

I hope that you guys now understand the whole purpose of this not-very-small Prologue arc. Kurenai's lessons are going to affect Team 7 and the plot in many ways throughout the fic, and so is Hinata's presence in the main cast.

By now, you guys should also have a more in-depth view of how our four heroes work and the kind of problems that they will be dealing with. Some of those I blatantly threw on your faces, others I only mentioned in passing, and a few have yet to even be problems yet... but as I am sure that you have figured out, this fic is heavy on the introspection. This is not the first nor the last time that you will be seeing our heroes struggling with their inner demons.

But... this fic is a Naruhina fic, right? We still haven't seen much of Naruto and Hinata interacting with each other just yet, but you will see their friendship getting established in the next few chapters... with a more than a few helpful nudges from a certain pink-haired girl, of course.

I think some of you might be a bit weirded out by Hinata's reactions to Naruto. Remember that she's just a little girl with a (rather strong) crush on a person that she also admires deeply. Love? We are not quite there yet. But for a while she will hang on to a very childish way of thinking, bordering on obsession like how most crushes work

And then there is her fainting... I think this is sufficiently fishy for you guys now, right? I have provided a hint of where I will be going with that, but I guess that only fellow author _**Serious Sam**_ (if he is still reading this, of course), will be able to guess it correctly, as what is happening to Hinata is related to a small thing I borrowed from his fic, **My Precious People**. Not to mention that the hint I dropped was during Team 7's section of the chapter...

Well, get ready for Chapter 6!

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.0.1 (11/16/2015)

Fixed two typos and one grammar mistake. Thank _gio08_ for warning me of them.

1.0.1 to 1.0.2 (12/29/2015)

Fixed a few crude mistakes. *bangs head on wall*

1.0.2 to 2.0 (07/13/2016)

Fixed more crude mistakes, some formatting issues, revisited some paragraphs that needed polish.


	6. Chapter 6 - Bonds, part 2

So, here it is! The conclusion to the Prologue arc!

First of all, my apologies for yet another delay... my beta was caught in the middle of a storm and couldn't get home to finish his work in time and send it to me. And then it turned out that there were a LOT of things to fix in this chapter, so the revision process was much longer for both of us. I could've posted it yesterday, yes, but it would be without a full proofread done. Not a good idea.

That's pretty much it, though I did waste 30 mins watching the last Smash Bros direct and shaking my head at the whole thing. Can't believe Robin, Lucina and Corrin all got in and Chrom is still just a final smash... IMO they should've added Itsuki+Chrom (Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE aka SMTxFE) to advertise a game that NEEDED that kind of thing. Fates will sell wonderfully on its own—heck, it already did in japan...

Reopened salty old wounds aside, there's an action sequence towards the end. It's nowhere as big as Chapter 4's were (this one is just a spar) and is hardly the focus of the chapter... Nonetheless, I hope that you will enjoy it (and the rest of the chapter, of course).

...That's all I wanted to say for now. Oh, actually, maybe you should look up the info on my profile if you haven't already. But read this chapter first, since you are already here.

* * *

 _The Prologue_

Chapter 6: Bonds, part 2 (Current Version: 2.0)

* * *

"Ugh, I can still smell the stink of booze," Kiba whined, waving his hand in front of his nose in an attempt to alleviate his suffering.

The children had split up from the adults only a few minutes beforehand, at the entrance of the Hokage's tower, because Tazuna's hotel was in the opposite direction of where Training Ground 3 was located. Currently, the two genin squads were walking through the busy streets Konoha, with Team 7 leading the way. All three of Kakashi's students were silent, their attention split between the walk and overhearing Team 8's conversation.

"You know, talking about smells reminds me of something," Kiba turned to a nervous-looking Hinata, who was between himself and Shino. "What happened back there when we left you alone with Kakashi?"

Hinata gulped, dreading the direction this conversation was sure to take. "W-well... I... Kakashi-sensei wanted to talk about that attack that I landed on him. And... and when I t-tried to get up, my foot starting hurting, so he brought me to the infirmary."

The girl was fully aware that she was not following Kakashi's suggestion; she should've also mentioned his lecture about trust and that she definitely needed to apologize to her team... but knowing what she had to do and actually having the courage to do it were very, very different things. Talking about one's own failures was generally not very easy for the average person, but Hinata took failing others much harder than most thanks to her upbringing. She could only hope that Kiba would drop the subject, but she knew better than to actually expect it.

"And... what happened in the infirmary? Did the nurse find out why you fainted? Y-you're not sick, right?" Kiba asked, not even giving the girl enough time to answer. While Shino realized that Hinata was hiding something and that she had purposefully mentioned the infirmary to change the subject, the Inuzuka took the bait immediately, worried about his teammate's well-being.

"N-not... not exactly," Hinata frowned, uneasy. "I... apparently I f-fainted because of chakra exhaustion. When the nurse went to heal me, he said... that the tenketsu of the feet and the surrounding area were b-burned from releasing too much chakra at once, even though I... I don't really think that I used that much chakra. He healed me, but I won't be able to t-train with you guys for around 3 hours or so. The nurse said that the damage was on my chakra pathway system, so I shouldn't use chakra for the time being."

Hinata once again was weirded out by the diagnosis. Though she considered that a miscalculation was possible, the Byakugan allowed her know that she hadn't been using that much chakra. The nurse became unsure about her condition when she had explained that, but all of her other symptoms matched chakra exhaustion.

Normally, when people are just "out of chakra", it merely means that they don't have enough to use it in techniques, even low-cost ones like a weak Gentle Fist strike or a Clone Jutsu. However, all humans require a certain amount of chakra to survive, and if their reserves end up with less than what the body needs then the body shuts down to conserve the physical and spiritual energies necessary to produce chakra. Having the brain work with less chakra than usual easily explains the headache, but the damage to Hinata's legs had no certain cause yet.

"Well, I guess that using that move again is out of question then, huh? How does that attack even work anyways? I never heard of a Hyuuga using Gentle Fist with the legs." Kiba had been very surprised by the blue flash that he saw coming from Hinata's feet right before Kakashi dragged her underground. It seemed illogical, but when the jonin surfaced, it was clear that he couldn't move his hands and that the Gentle Fist had been used. _'Or maybe Gentle Step would be a better name,'_ Kiba mused.

"As much as I am also curious, I believe that there is a more important question to be asked," Shino interrupted, drawing the attention of his two teammates to himself. "What was the reasoning behind choosing to use such an attack to counter Kakashi's doton technique, Hinata?"

"Isn't it obvious?" the Inuzuka snorted. "She was trying to give us an opening to get the bells, duh!" Kiba thought that Shino's question was pointless, but the way Hinata paled and immediately looked away made him rethink that conclusion.

"I am not questioning that, which was obvious enough that even you were able to figure out." It took two seconds for the Inuzuka to realize that he was being insulted, but Shino continued before Kiba could say anything else. "But that strategy would leave Hinata unable to help us unless you went back to dig her out, as Akamaru had been unconscious at that point. That would either leave me to fight Kakashi by myself or directly result in him fleeing and us having to pursue him again. I believe that we had agreed to get the bells together."

"I... I fainted right a-afterwards, s-so I don't re—"

"You just said that you didn't use enough chakra to pass out when you tried that attack," Shino cut her off, not even allowing the girl to finish telling her hastily-made lie.

"And from the way you looked at me when you turned around, I know that you had a plan." Kiba continued, now regarding the girl with suspicion.

Hinata stared at her feet, not having enough courage to look at her teammates. _'Should I tell them?'_

But Shino essentially made the decision for her. "The plan was for all of us to get the bells, but you went against that, willingly. Were you still not trying to get the bells so that Kiba and I wouldn't be sent back to the academy?"

The girl's lavender eyes widened.

"Wait, what are you talking about?" Kiba looked back and forth between his teammates, not knowing from where that question had come from. Despite Hinata's silent plea for him to don't say anything, Shino told Kiba about his conversation with Hinata when they met up in the woods (though he at least did not say anything about how she was crying before that, much to the girl's relief).

"Hinata, are you crazy?! Your clan would practically kill you if you went back to the academy!" While Kiba wasn't aware of how exactly the Hyuuga Clan would deal with such a situation, he knew that they wouldn't take it well and he was sure that Hinata had the most to lose out of the three of them. "And wait a sec, I thought that you and Shino had figured out that we needed to grab the bells together to pass. You were even the one to tell me that!"

An awkward, tense silence formed between the members of Team 8.

Hinata knew that she had been caught and that she owned her teammates an explanation, but she was struggling to find the right words to say, never mind gathering the courage to actually speak up. Meanwhile, Shino and Kiba wanted answers, but they saw that the girl was fidgeting in a way that suggested that she was trying to think of something to say, so they gave her some space. The trio of eavesdroppers that were just ahead of them didn't know what to make of everything they were hearing.

Eventually, Hinata started to speak. "I... I was r-really scared of... of what w-would've happened to you two if you d-didn't pass and... and since I'm the most useless of our team, I t-thought that if one of us had to fail, it should've been me. Kakashi-sensei didn't confirm that w-we were right about how to pass the test, s-so..."

"So you assumed the worst and acted on your own to ensure that I and Kiba would pass." Shino completed, his flat tone still managing to convey his disappointment. "I believe that I told you before that our team does not function properly without you or any of its members." The boy also was hurt that Hinata hadn't believed in him, but he chose not to mention that. She looked troubled enough as it was.

"Yeah, Shino's right!" Kiba agreed, looking at the girl expectantly. "C'mon Hinata, we wouldn't be Team 8 without you!" Even Akamaru barked in agreement, looking down worriedly at the young Hyuuga from his position atop his owner's head.

"I... sorry. I-I hope that you can forgive me..."

"I forgive you, but don't repeat this kind of performance again," Shino stated bluntly, unaware of the glare that Kiba was sending his way.

Seeing that the Aburame didn't make Hinata feel much better, the Inuzuka quickly tried to make up for his friend's lackluster social skills. "Hey, don't worry too much about it. Everything worked out in the end, didn't it?" Kiba then gently ruffled her hair, knowing that a hug would not have the comforting effect he wanted thanks to Hinata being somewhat adverse to physical contact. A small giggle told him that he, at least, succeeded in raising her spirits a little. "But be more careful next time, got it?"

The Inuzuka smiled, raising an eyebrow when he saw that Hinata actually tried to fix her hair afterwards. Hinata wasn't known for caring that much about her appearance, and her hair hadn't been in a perfect state to begin with (much like her coat). Kiba did know that he had never seen Hinata trying to look prettier after training, so it weirded him out.

A hint of amusement was added to his smile once he realized that a certain blond's presence might have been the cause of that unusual behavior. _'This girl never changes. Though I guess that I shouldn't mention to her that what she is doing is kinda useless with her clothes as dirty as they are...'_

Hinata mumbled an affirmative to Kiba's earlier question, happy that her teammates weren't angry with her, but it was drowned out by Shino's voice. "You do not have much credibility to be berating someone for their carelessness. Fighting Kakashi on your own was your least intelligent decision yet, which is truly saying something."

"Hey, Akamaru was with me!" The Inuzuka growled, followed by a bark from the aforementioned dog.

"That's beside the point and—"

"Shino-kun, d-don't provoke Kiba-kun like that," Hinata pleaded, making the boys back away from each other. Hinata had a slight frown of worry, but it went away as a shy smile appeared instead. "B-besides, Shino-kun, have you forgotten about our last D-rank mission?"

"Ah, indeed. That was far more idiotic."

Kiba groaned. "Even you, Hinata?! I thought we agreed to never talk about that again," he huffed. "In the end, you are really my only ally, right Akamaru?"

The dog merely jumped from Kiba's head to the ground and walked beside Hinata, turning his back on his master. The girl in question merely giggled at Kiba's incredulous expression. "He still hasn't forgiven you."

"I already apologized to him! Traitor..." The Inuzuka growled, crossing his arms. "Stupid Nara clan and their stupid-looking deer..."

"I thought they were cute..." Hinata mumbled.

Kiba snorted. "You weren't the one who got chased by them."

"Indeed, Hinata wasn't stupid enough to have tried to—"

"Argh, just shut it already, Shino! You know that I only did what I did because you..."

As Hinata then tried to diffuse the ongoing conflict between her teammates, the members of Team 7 quietly reflected on what Kurenai had said to them and how her own team seemed to prove her right.

Sakura saw first-hand how supporting her teammates could be important. She wasn't familiar with Shino, and as such didn't know that his actions weren't as insensible as they seemed, but Kiba had shown her a clear example of how she could help her teammates with their issues. Despite calling her crazy, Kiba did try to help Hinata overcome her problem a little and managed to make the girl smile in the end. Perhaps, Sakura thought, one day she might be supporting Naruto and Sasuke like that.

Sasuke, on the other hand, was thinking about how Shino said that Team 8 wouldn't be working as well without any of its members. Once you compared what each of them was able to do, it was easy to realize that having only two of them instead of all three would indeed cripple the team, both in combat and when tracking. They were at their strongest when they were together. The Aburame also showed to Sasuke that his teammates could be annoying, but they just might be worth the trouble... one day. But much had to change before that happened, and that included himself.

Naruto's thoughts were along the lines of those of his teammates, but with a completely different focus.

The blond wondered if his teammates could one day be there for him if his life's problems ever became too big for him to handle by himself. He had barely ever interacted with Hinata, preferring to avoid the Hyuuga since she always looked away from him whenever he even glanced at her, but he did know that the blue-haired girl was always isolated from the rest of the class. If Naruto had to guess, Shino and Kiba were likely the only friends that the girl had—possibly the first ones. Naruto knew that in her position, he too wouldn't want to let go of friends as valuable as those two were.

But would Sakura and Sasuke prove to be such friends to him one day? And, more importantly... even if they started to treat him better, would they stick around if they found out the truth about the Kyuubi? Or would they become exactly as those villagers that kept glaring and whispering insults about him, even today?

Naruto learned to ignore them, but he could still see a few scowls directed at him as they walked through Konoha. And now that he knew the reason why, now that he knew that it wasn't his fault... they were starting to bother him again.

What Naruto didn't know was that the other five kids also had noticed how the villagers were reacting in an unusual way. Only Hinata knew who the target of those nasty looks was, but none of them had an idea of why the villagers were behaving like that in the first place. Thankfully, they wouldn't have to endure those glares for too long, as Training Ground 3 wasn't located very far from where they were.

The group reached the training ground's gates soon after Shino and Kiba started arguing, and all six of the genin were looking forward to eating something and resting for a few minutes.

* * *

The preparations for lunch were rather uneventful, if one ignored how Kakashi and Kurenai scared everyone with their sudden body flickers not too soon after the kids found a good, shaded area to have lunch on. The trees provided a good cover from the harsh sunlight of the midday sun, allowing everyone to eat their food without worrying about sunburns or intense heat.

After everyone sat down on the grass and started to eat, the two jonin quickly started to discuss how the results of their training sessions with their respective genin teams.

Kakashi and Sakura were currently talking about possible specialties that the girl could choose to devote herself to, but the jonin found it strange that she hadn't made her choice already. "From what Kurenai told me, you have enough talent to be her successor one day, so why not stick with that?"

"I can't," Sakura answered, shaking her head to reinforce her point. "I need something that will help me fight against a Sharingan-wielder." She knew that Itachi had been just an illusion... but when the time to face the real deal came, she needed to be able to help Sasuke (and maybe Naruto) fight him. _'I won't be useless like that. Not again, ever.'_

Sasuke, who had been quietly overhearing the conversation, also had been curious about why Sakura didn't seem to want become a genjutsu specialist. His first guess was that the girl didn't want to interact with Kurenai anymore, but while that was part of the answer, it wasn't the full story.

 _'I have never seen Sakura looking so... determined,'_ Sasuke noted, seeing a fire burning within Sakura's emerald eyes. _'She is truly serious about this. Perhaps I really was wrong about her.'_

Kakashi couldn't help but smile after hearing her answer. "Alright, let's continue to consider our options, then."

Meanwhile, Kiba and Shino believed that Kurenai's smile was because of their performance during Kakashi's test, as well as how they managed to do well against the jonin during their fight against him. The boys weren't wrong, but Kurenai was also smiling out of relief from overhearing the other team's conversation. _'It might not have been the best choice,'_ she noted, _'but it looks like it wasn't the wrong choice.'_

The woman then focused back on her own team, congratulating the three for their good teamwork. As she did so, however, Kurenai noticed that Hinata was not paying much attention to her. Sure, the girl nodded or mumbled a yes at the right times (depending on whether or not she had food in her mouth), but her lavender eyes were intently focused on another person: Naruto.

Said blond was viciously wolfing down his boxed lunch, wearing a happy grin on his face as he did so. _'This food's amazing...! This is easily the second-best thing I have eaten. Despite the veggies...'_ Naruto thought, gleefully devouring a piece of pork as he did so. Of course, the food that held the top spot in Naruto's list of favorites was obviously ramen. But not just any ramen, but it was Ichiraku's ramen.

Naruto didn't know if he would ever be able to find food better than Teuchi's ramen. The ramen was not only of the highest quality... but Naruto was also emotionally attached to the dish. Outside of earning his headband from Iruka after defeating Mizuki, all of Naruto's most precious memories could be traced back to that simple restaurant and a hot bowl of ramen. Perhaps one day he'd be able to forge better memories centered around another person's food, even if it's still ramen...

 _'Ha, as if,'_ Naruto thought bitterly, his grin faltering slightly. _'I don't have a mom or dad, so it's not like this will ever happen. Not with the whole village hating me because of this stupid fox...'_

Naruto decided to listen to his stomach rather than the voices inside his head and went back to enjoy his food while it lasted.

His mood swing was well hidden by his smile and the loud, pleased noises the blond made as he ate. But as the saying goes, the eyes are the window to the soul. And a certain someone had been carefully trying to look through that window, unsure if her crush had truly liked the food or was just eating it because he was that hungry.

Hinata was actually really confident when it came to cooking, but this was Naruto who was eating her food! Ironically, the one person that gave her confidence to not give up and keep trying to improve was also the one making her so anxious and insecure at the current moment.

The blue-haired girl stopped eating altogether when she caught a glimpse of darkness on Naruto's eyes. _'Is... is there something wrong with my food?'_

Normally the girl would have immediately assumed the worst despite knowing that her food was good... but that look that Naruto had made her question herself. It was something she had only seen in Naruto's eyes a few times before, mostly when he spent hours training by himself and became frustrated with the lack of results, or a few times when she caught him staring at happy families that passed him by in the streets.

The last time she had seen his eyes without their usual happy sparkle was in the day when Naruto failed the academy's graduation exam. He hadn't even bothered to hide his pain behind a smile and just sat on the swing, depressed. To think that her cooking would bring about that side of Naruto... it was possible, but Hinata concluded that it was very questionable.

"You know, your food will get cold if you just stare at him all day long. You should just talk to him!"

A startled Hinata squealed from the sudden interruption, making her immediately turn around to see who had caught her.

"S-Sakura-san...?! N-no! I-I wasn't... er... I mean...!" Seeing that Sakura was just giggling at her, Hinata realized that trying to hide her true intentions from the pinkette was useless and merely covered her reddening face with her hands, muffling an embarrassed groan while at it.

While Naruto had failed to notice the heiress thanks to her delicious cooking and the dark thoughts occupying his mind, Hinata's subtle and not-so-subtle stares didn't escape the notice of the other two females of the group, in particular because the girl simply stopped eating at one point.

Finally realizing why Hinata had been disappointed at the team setups, Kurenai decided to discreetly help out her student by asking Kakashi about where he thought Shino and Kiba could improve, which made Sakura free to converse with other people. Not missing the hint, Sakura got up and went to sit near Hinata, intent on starting a conversation with the girl who was more interested in watching Naruto eat rather than having lunch herself.

"I wouldn't have thought you were the kind of girl that would believe in the classic "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach," but I must admit that it was a good idea," Sakura spoke hushedly, though the teasing tone was still there to contrast with her innocent smile. "That was a pretty sneaky way of catching his attention, you know?" Sakura then giggled some more at how Hinata's naturally pale face was matching the crimson color of her cheongsam.

"B-but... but I-I didn't do anything special...!" Hinata denied and started to twirl her pointer fingers, looking away as her nervous habit surfaced thanks to her embarrassment. It's not like Sakura was fully wrong, but that hadn't been the mindset the Hyuuga had when she decided to cook earlier that morning. _'Not that it isn't a good idea...'_

In response, Sakura frowned and waggled her pointer finger at the girl. "Hey, don't even try to lie to me; Naruto's bento had almost twice as much pork than mine. Or yours for that matter," she pointed at Hinata's half-eaten bento. "Are you going to tell me that it was just a coincidence?"

The shy girl's face burned brighter, which confirmed Sakura's theory. But before Hinata could even try to deny the accusation, someone else started talking to her.

"Hey, um... Hinata, right? Are you going to eat that? Your food's been like that for a while..."

The girls turned to see Naruto pointing at Hinata's bento with his chopsticks, staring at it with a hungry gaze.

Hinata briefly made eye-contact and, much to her relief, she could find none of that darkness that she saw earlier... but the fact that he was actually paying attention to her made Hinata even more nervous than usual, especially once she registered what Naruto had actually said. _'Oh no! Does that mean that he was looking at me!? Did he catch me sta—'_

"Come on, say something...! You can do it!" Sakura discreetly whispered, trying to encourage her fellow kunoichi in a low voice so that Naruto wouldn't be able to overhear her.

Hinata hesitated for about three seconds as she considered what her answer was going to be. Though her pounding heart didn't help her focus, she managed to offer her own boxed lunch to her crush, mumbling something that sounded like "Please take it!" as her barely audible answer. The girl's head hanged low, a necessity if she wanted to avoid gazing at Narutos blue eyes and crumbling under the pressure.

"Uh, alright then!" The Uzumaki quickly grabbed the box, correctly assuming that whatever Hinata had just stuttered meant it was all right to do so. Naruto also noticed that the girl's bento had much less pork than the one that he had just eaten, but he thought nothing of it outside of regretting having less food to override the taste of the evil greenies (which weren't as insuferable as usual, to boot).

 _'Um... not as tasty as the one that I ate, but still really good.'_

Upon seeing that Naruto got a second helping, Akamaru couldn't help but let out an envious whine, which didn't go unnoticed by his owner. "What? Ah, c'mon, don't tell me you wanted that too?"

Akamaru's wagging tail was as good as an yes, making Kiba scowl at his partner. "Didn't you learn anything from eating that sandwich that fell from the sky right in front of us? Don't try to eat other people's leftovers!" Kiba scolded the dog freely now that Kurenai was engaged in a discussion with Kakashi.

His comment, though, immediately caught Naruto's attention. "Hey... a sandwich... fell from the sky? ...Right in front of you...? Like, around 8 a.m?" the blond asked in-between bites, looking at his former classmate.

The Inuzuka nodded, before swallowing one of the last contents of his own bento. "Yup. That made Akamaru jump to get it, but a cat stole it at the last second. Then this stupid mutt chased after it and I had to follow him! Not wanting to sound like Shikamaru, but it was definitively troublesome..." he growled, before his brain fully processed Naruto's questions. "Hey, how do even you know _when_ this happened? I never said when the sandwich fell!"

Naruto paled as he dropped the rice his chopsticks held, now realizing he had said too much. Again. "I... guessed it?" Kiba's eyes narrowed. "That... might've been my sandwich? Oops?"

"What."

Naruto gulped, and not just because of the food he was trying to swallow. "I _kinda_ slipped on a rooftop while rushing to meet my team and Kurenai-sensei, and I dropped it. Sorry." The Uzumaki blurted out quickly and tried to turn away to go back to his food as casually as possible, but it was too late already.

Kiba angrily pointed at him. "Damn, you idiot! It was all your fault! I want payback, gimme that bento!"

"No way!" Naruto dodged Kiba's lunge. "This is too delicious for me to give it up that easily!" he screamed, moving the bento out of the Inuzuka's reach and almost dropping the whole thing on the grass in doing so.

While the wild boys were about to brawl, Sakura could only sigh at the scene that played before her eyes, with an exasperated expression on her face. "Boys will be boys, I suppose." She shook her head before once again turning to the blue-haired girl that was sitting beside her. "But hey, Hinata, did you hear that? He liked your food!"

The shy girl gave a small but radiant smile and giggled once she registered that Naruto actually liked her cooking. "I'm so glad that he did...!"

Sakura then poked the girl's ribs, making her squeal. "So you admit you were trying to win him over with food! I knew it!" While she mercilessly teased the heiress, she couldn't help but think about the girl's reactions towards the energetic blond. _'She looked that happy just because he liked her food? How cute! I bet that idiot would've given up on me if she actually talked to him instead of just staring like a weirdo. Though... it's not like she was doing a good job at not being obvious. How can he be so oblivious?!'_

Deciding that she had enough of teasing Hinata for the moment, and just in case the girl had gotten the wrong idea from their interactions, she changed tactics. "Hey, if you need any help in making that knucklehead notice you, count on me! I'd be glad to help him get over his silly crush on me... well, as long as you don't try to use Sasuke-kun to mak

e him jealous; then our partnership is over!" Sakura joked.

Even though she would really mean those words if it came to that (and would seriously consider going out with Naruto purely out of spite, if he still had interest), Sakura knew that Hinata's problem was mostly a lack of courage and confidence. Asking Naruto out would be easier for the shy girl than asking out Sasuke, considering the latter's personality and romantic track record, Sakura believed.

"Ah! D-don't worry, I... am not interested in Sasuke-kun," Hinata assured her.

 _'And there's this, too,'_ Sakura frowned. _'What the hell is wrong with this girl...? I mean, Naruto's not that bad of a guy, but... come on, him over Sasuke-kun?! That's... just plain ridiculous!'_

"But, thank you Sakura-san," Hinata bowed slightly, confused by the other girl's displeased reaction. "Um... if I can help you in the same way too, p-please don't hesitate to ask!"

Sakura bobbed her head and smiled in response. She had a feeling that despite Hinata's lack of confidence, the one girl that never pursued Sasuke Uchiha might be able to get some info on him for her, which would be useful in getting the brooding boy to open up to her... and to Naruto too, she supposed.

The pinkette also wondered why she never tried to speak with Hinata before, now realizing that she probably would've been a good friend during her days at the academy. Of course, the answer to that question was that Sakura had been too busy running around after Sasuke to even notice the shy bluenette, which made her a hypocrite considering that she was internally insulting Naruto over the same mistake in her mind seconds ago.

The Hyuuga, on the other hand, thought that her newest friend wasn't that bad of a person, having previously held a very negative view of the pinkette thanks to her behavior towards Sasuke and especially Naruto.

Hinata was also glad that she seemed to support her crush and was apparently willing to help her with it. Considering that Sakura was Naruto's teammate, it was clear that she would be the best person to help her to get noticed by him. _'And making Naruto-kun stop having a crush on her would definitely be a good thing. Sakura-san has good ideas,'_ Hinata decided, not immediately realizing that Sakura wanted to play matchmaker instead of just helping her to be friends with Naruto, which is what Hinata currently wanted. Or rather, what she thought was realistically feasible.

"Yeah, I'd appreciate it." Sakura smiled at her new friend, but her expression turned serious right afterwards. "You know, after what Kurenai-sensei showed us today I'm trying a new strategy with Sasuke-kun, but if it blows I will probably really need your help. Right now I'll try to focus on becoming a better kunoichi and a better friend to him and Naruto, but... if that doesn't work then I dunno what else I could do," she confessed, uncertain.

"W-we'll figure it out! I'm sure w-we can think of... something!" Hinata faltered for a second because she quickly realized she had no idea of how to help her new friend, at least not at the moment.

"But that doesn't matter just yet," Sakura said, noticing her friend's worry. "For now, I'll focus on becoming stronger. Sasuke-kun respects strength," Sakura stated, letting a teasing grin spread through her face. "And luckily for you, Naruto works in the same way! You've made an impression on him after what you did to Kakashi-sensei, you know? And if I know that knucklehead, I'd guess that he wants to see how strong you are with his own two eyes. Oh, and then there is this food that you made! He even wanted seconds! Isn't that great?"

Hinata started playing with her fingers again, feeling a bit overwhelmed by Sakura's excitement, but she couldn't hide the small smile that was blossoming on her flushed face. _'I guess that he really knows that I exist, now.'_ On the back of her mind she realized how pathetic she was sounding, but for once, her happiness was strong enough to override those disheartening feelings.

"You need to teach me how to cook like that, by the way. Your food was delicious! My cooking, though, is an absolute disaster," Sakura commented, looking somewhat depressed.

Hinata's eyes widened and so did her smile. Now _this_ was something she was sure she could help with. "Oh, I'd be glad to teach you!" We could try to cook during the mission! What do you want to work on first? I know many recipes that we could practice and—"

"H-hey, slow down a bit!" Sakura said, making a mental note that cooking was a good way of making Hinata crawl out of her shell. "Let's save that for later, ok? I don't want to risk causing a fire on our client's house, even if he's disgusting. Anyways, like I said, my focus right now needs to be on my career so that I can help Naruto and Sasuke-kun during fights. But one of these days I'll take you up on your offer, ok?"

"Sure!" Hinata nodded enthusiastically, before reverting to her usual timid self soon afterwards. "Um, if you don't mind me asking... w-what made you decide to... uh..."

"Be more serious about this whole "ninja" thing?" Sakura suggested, amused by the girl's mood swing. "Well, let's just say that your teacher's training was very... enlightening. I don't agree with her methods, but I'm not forgetting her lesson anytime soon. Anyways, what about your training?" Sakura changed the subject with a strained smile. "What did you do to Kakashi-sensei that landed you and him both in the hospital? I heard you and your team talking but I didn't really get "

And so the girls kept chatting for a while longer, until eventually Kakashi and Kurenai got up to put an end to their lunch break. "Alright kids, listen up," Kakashi called, interrupting the girls, but failing to make Naruto and Kiba stop their bickering.

Sakura groaned, shaking her head at their childish display. "Ugh, I can't believe they are still at it..."

Hinata didn't answer, too busy trying to find out if Naruto had managed to eat the food she gave him or not.

"We gave you some free time, but now it's been a while _and we have some training to do!_ " Kurenai raised her voice, but the boys kind of ignored her and kept arguing, much to the kunoichi's exasperation.

"It doesn't matter! It's your fault for being so clumsy! What kind of ninja even _trips_ on a rooftop anyways!?"

"Argh... whatever! I say the blame's on you. It was YOUR dog that ate my sandwich, so YOU should be giving me your lunch!"

"The only food I have for you is a delicious knuckle sandwich! If you want it that badly, open your mouth! I'll feed it to you!"

Sasuke decided that he had heard too much. "Stop barking so loudly, Inuzuka. You look like a dog begging for leftovers."

Said boy glared at him, leaving Naruto be for a moment. "Dog, eh? Really original insult there," Kiba spat with disgust. "Like I haven't heard that one at the academy before, Uchiha."

Sasuke shrugged. "Considering that your scores were almost as low as Naruto's, you can't blame me for assuming that you are bad of hearing."

 _'Gee... it's not hot anymore,'_ Naruto whined to himself, finishing what Hinata had once started now that Kiba was distracted. _'Well, at least it still tastes good.'_

"Bad of hearing!? How dare you!? I'm an Inuzuka, dammit!" Kiba exclaimed, his pride wounded.

"And what is that supposed to explain?" Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "The only thing this tells me is that you are good at picking up bones."

Kiba growled, openly barring his teeth at the Uchiha. "I don't know how you do it, Naruto. Having to put up with this prick's attitude every day must be a nightmare."

"Good thing that Naruto is a bigger idiot than you," Sasuke scoffed before Naruto could answer, "because that's the only reason that you didn't end up being the dead last, and thus, my teammate. Putting up with your fleas everyday would've been a nightmare."

"Oi, Kiba! Why don't we show this jerk who is the real idiot here, huh?!" Naruto got up, finally finished with his food. The boy's tone would indicate that he was mad, but one look at his grin and you'd see that he was mostly just excited. And you'd see some food crumbles, too.

"Heh, now you're talking!" Kiba grinned, cracking his knuckles. "Let's go teach this asshole a lesson! Right, Akamaru!?" The puppy barked in response, jumping in front of his master in preparation for the incoming fight.

Sasuke glanced at the empty container that previously held Hinata's lunch and smirked, sharing a knowing look with Naruto. Getting up, the Uchiha made a "come here" gesture with his left hand. "Three against one is hardly fair, but since Shino is still eating I guess I could go easy on you to even the odds."

"Well, I was talking about one-on-one fights, but this works for me," Kakashi piped in. "Feel free to use jutsu and ninja tools. If things get out of hand then I'll intervene," he spoke, bringing out his a volume of Icha Icha Paradise from his pocket as he did so.

"Besides," Kurenai added, briefly shooting a glare at Kakashi, "I know medical ninjutsu, so don't worry about holding back. But smoke balls are banned, Kiba. Save those for the mission, alright?"

"You heard that, Inuzuka? No toys."

"I don't need toys to make a mess out of you!" Kiba skipped the "getting up" part altogether and just lunged at Sasuke from his position on the floor, effectively starting the fight. Thankfully, Sasuke managed to avoid him and had the decency to run away from where they were having lunch.

"Bring it on then!" The Uchiha taunted as he dashed towards the area with the wooden posts. "I'll teach you why three times zero is zero."

"I'll make you eat those words! Akamaru, Naruto, let's go!" Another bark and cry of "Shadow Clone Jutsu" were heard following Kiba's words, and thus, the fight officially started. While Kurenai walked away to talk with the remaining three students, Kakashi remained to watch the fight.

The silver-haired man had already noticed how Sakura was trying to change herself, but he was glad to see that both of the other members of Team 7 were also trying to get alongside each other better, in their own ways.

Neither Naruto nor Sasuke had much of an idea of how to interact with each other in a friendly manner, but while they still threw insults around, Sasuke wasn't as dismissive as before and Naruto seemed to be making an effort to not act so confrontational. And of course, the trash talking that issued before the fight began also was significant. Kakashi didn't know if it was Sasuke's only reason to do so, but still he saw the Uchiha discreetly signaling to Naruto for him to eat while he provoked Kiba. It was a small start, but a start nonetheless.

As for the only female of Team 7... she, for once, wasn't thinking about her precious Sasuke-kun. Instead, Sakura's thoughts were turned toward the other two boys. "They were at each other's throats just seconds ago and now they are teaming up to fight? Psh. Men are all the same..."

"I beg to differ," Shino objected from behind the girls, catching them off-guard and earning a startled scream from both.

The Aburame frowned from the realization that, despite sitting less than a meter away from the pair, they weren't aware of him. "While I do enjoy a good challenge, I would rather not participate in those heated arguments they seem so fond of; I also do not make alliances so carelessly." Hinata wondered if he wasn't talking just about Naruto and Kiba when he said that. Could that have been a warning?

"W-where did you even come from?!" Sakura stuttered loudly, still not having recovered from the scare.

Giving a stealthy sigh that wasn't noticed by anyone, much like himself, the boy reluctantly answered Sakura. "...I was right here before you even sat down, Sakura-san. I assumed that you were at least aware of my presence prior to starting your conversation with my teammate, considering that you were looking straight at me when you were walking towards Hinata, but clearly, I was mistaken."

Sakura looked away, embarrassed by her oversight. Hinata, however, managed to maintain eye contact despite being feeling bad for forgetting about her teammate. "S-so... you heard e-everything...?"

"I did. It was very interesting, if I do say so myself." Human behavior when feelings of a romantic nature were involved never ceased to amaze Shino. It made people act so illogically, that he couldn't help but try to make some sense of their actions.

While Sakura tried to "politely convince" Shino to not share what he heard with anyone else, Hinata merely turned away to look at the scuffle between the other boys, not having the guts to face Shino at the moment, and conveniently took the opportunity to see how Naruto and Kiba were faring against Sasuke. The Uchiha was, after all, the strongest genin of their year and a dangerous foe even if he was outnumbered... But from what she could see, Kiba was actually doing more damage to his team than Sasuke, since he kept hitting Naruto's clones with his Passing Fang while the Uchiha merely avoided them both with ease.

 _'I wonder how long it will take before this becomes a free-for-all...'_ she wondered idly as the blond started to quarrel with his partner mid-fight while Sasuke kept insulting his foes as he threw some shuriken at Akamaru and the few clones that were still focusing on him.

"Well, since Kakashi's watching the fight..." Kurenai started with a calm facade that hid her nervousness, "Sakura, how about we work more on the two genjutsu that I taught you?"

"...I thought you said that I had already mastered them." Sakura retorted, dryly. The prospect of learning from Kurenai didn't excite her as it once had.

"You can perform the illusion perfectly, yes, but you still require hand signs to do so. It will be much harder for your opponents to know that they are caught in a genjutsu if they don't see you preparing it, so there is still room for improvement. You can't always count on an ambush, after all."

"...Fine. Let's get this over with." Sakura crossed her arms and walked towards another part of the clearing, quite a distance away from the ongoing fight and near the memorial stone.

Hinata and Shino watched the conversation with unease, unsure of what could've been the cause of the girl's resentful tone of voice. Sakura generally didn't try to control herself when she was feeling angry, and to see her purposefully holding back to not lash out at Kurenai was unsettling.

Kurenai, for her part, was happy that the girl at least was still willing to learn from her. She knew that Sakura wouldn't be forgiving her anytime soon, so what happened was one of her best-case scenarios, actually.

The woman then addressed one of her actual students. "Shino, I believe that for now it would be best to wait with Kakashi until your turn to fight comes up." The quiet Aburame nodded and silently followed after Kakashi, leaving Kurenai alone with Hinata.

"Um... Kurenai-sensei? What about me?"

The jonin crouched down to the same level as the last genin of her team. "The nurse said you should rest, right? Kakashi told me about it. You have been taking it easy because of lunch, but your leg needs more time to fully heal on its own. You don't want to be in a less-than-perfect condition before going into a mission."

"But what about my training?" Hinata insisted, not exactly liking the idea of lagging behind her fellow genin, be it from a bad leg or lack of training.

"Don't worry, we will be here for a while," Kurenai assured. "You will fight like everyone else, just later. For now, do as the nurse recommended." Kurenai then walked away to where Sakura currently was. With Shino and Kakashi busy watching the fight between the other boys, Hinata now found herself alone.

Refusing to be completely useless, she dutifully cleaned the mess everyone made during lunch and placed everything they used back inside her bag, noting with a smile that Naruto had eaten all of her food while Sasuke distracted Kiba. _'I'm glad that he enjoyed it... maybe I can cook for him again sometime during the mission?'_

Using her hand to cover a yawn, the heiress walked around the closest trees on the edge of the clearing where they were training on, searching for a good place to lay down. It didn't take her more than two minutes to find a tree that looked comfortable enough, one that happened to be facing the training ground's lake. "I guess a nap won't hurt..." Hinata reasoned with herself, placing her bag on the grass near her chosen spot.

Hinata hadn't said anything to her sensei or the nurse, but she had been feeling rather tired ever since her body (or most it) recovered from the chakra exhaustion, so perhaps it was a good thing that she'd be able to rest a little before training seriously like the others.

The girl sat near the tree's base, facing away from the brawl that was issuing nearby, in a position not unlike the one she had found herself in when she regained consciousness after fainting. Despite the loud noises that the younger males (sans Shino) were making in their dubiously friendly spar, Hinata found herself asleep only a few seconds after she closed her eyes.

* * *

Time passed... and after almost two hours, Hinata awakened from her slumber.

Unlike the other times this happened today, she woke up feeling energized and her mind was working clearly from the get-go—and thankfully there was also no headache. Experimentally, she lightly pressed one of her feet against the ground, and then repeated the process with as much strength as she could muster.

 _'Hmm... good! No pain at all,'_ she noted, getting up and walking a few steps to further confirm her theory.

After dusting herself, noting with disgust that her coat was still far too brown for her liking, Hinata approached the lake in order to wash her face. As she did so, the Hyuuga heard voices that she recognized as belonging to the three boys that were previously fighting each other when she had gone to sleep. They were a bit far from her, but still loud enough to be heard once she began to pay attention.

"...believe I lost because you farted. Heh, I guess old Tazuna wasn't lying 'bout your soiled diapers, eh? Hahaha!"

"Argh, shut up Kiba! Or do you want me to beat the crap out of you again!?"

Hinata smiled and walked away from the lake's edge towards where she had been sleeping, her face and hands still dripping with water.

"You would lose. Badly. The mutt isn't very smart but even he won't fall for the same trick twice."

"Yeah, he's right!" Sasuke's smirk went unnoticed by the Inuzuka. "There's no way I'm falling for your henge again. Though Akamaru still hasn't forgiven me for punching him..."

Opening her bag, Hinata took out a small violet towel and dried her face and hands with it. With that done, she carefully placed it back into the bag, closed it, and went to join the boys, who were now much closer to the wooded edge of the training ground's clearing than its center, where they were originally fighting.

Looking at the same trees that the boys were staring at, she managed to see Sakura in the middle of a fight against Shino. Before she could start paying attention to the duel, Hinata' attention was caught by Kakashi when he entered the conversation the boys were having.

"It won't work again but it's good that it happened. You see Kiba? I told you before to not mix up your senses like that. Naruto doesn't do genjutsu, so scents wouldn't have lied to you on that fight." The man's jovial tone and facial expression hinted that he was smiling behind his mask, probably because he was content with his student's win over Kurenai's. Though Hinata considered that maybe he just liked seeing Kiba squirm. _'Kiba-kun's not having a lucky day...'_

"Bah... I get it, okay? I'll work on it." The Inuzuka then cringed and pointed towards the fight that was happening in front of them. "Ouch, that must have hurt. Shino doesn't hold back even when fighting girls."

Seeing that everybody else had stopped talking to focus on the spar, Hinata also turned to watch it; but sadly, she only caught the very end of it. Namely, she saw Sakura being knocked down by a powerful jab aimed at her belly. The girl failed to get up immediately, allowing the Aburame to draw a kunai and point it at her.

Kurenai, seeing that the fight was over, called the match. "Alright, Shino wins this one. Good job, both of you."

The Aburame withdrew his kunai and offered his hand to his fallen opponent. Sakura happily accepted it, and even though on the back of her mind she was a bit squicked out by the idea of touching the bug-user's skin, her actions didn't betray her thoughts.

"I apologize for punching so strongly," Shino said in a monotone that completely failed to convey his intention, "but your defense was very good and I had to make use of the opportunity to end the fight." Helping the pinkette get up, he continued talking. "You made excellent use of the basic Clone Jutsu and the terrain. Finding the real you amidst the woods was harder than I had initially presumed."

He considered telling her that he intentionally avoided sensing the bug he had left with her when they were still inside the Hokage's tower, but some instinct told him that the conversation would end very badly if he said that.

"Thanks!" Sakura clutched the wounded area but still kept a light smile while she continued to talk. "And don't feel bad about hitting me, I can take a hit."

Then she turned to Kurenai and sighed. "You knew his bugs would let him easily detect my genjutsu, didn't you?" Sakura was becoming rather weary of the woman's insistence on intentionally putting people in crappy situations to teach them a lesson or two instead of just talking.

Kurenai nodded, smiling with a mix of amusement and guilt at the two genin. "The Aburame are somewhat of a hard counter to genjutsu users, aren't they? Sometimes you just get unlucky like that in the battlefield, but don't feel bad! You adapted to the situation quite well with the academy basics alone, which is impressive when you consider that you had no other techniques to fall back on." Kurenai then turned to face the three boys who were quietly watching the last moments of the match, only barely missing Hinata in the process. "So, which one of you wants to go next?"

Kiba was the first one to speak. "Eh, I'll pass... me and Akamaru are still tired and low on chakra, sorry sensei."

Sasuke smirked. "Heh, couldn't handle the heat, Inuzuka?"

"Shut up, Uchiha! You took quite a few hits from our Fang over Fang and missed your Great Fireball twice before hitting me, so it's not like you are in any shape to fight either. And the other time we fought, you lost!" Hinata did notice that Kiba's clothes were slightly singed.

The dark-haired boy scowled. "I wasn't expecting Naruto to just spam clones and run away. And three-on-one was hardly fair."

"Running away is not my style," Naruto piped in. "But it's not like I had a choice with Kiba going after my clones in the middle of the fight," the Uzumaki shrugged, before smiling mischievously at Sasuke. "Heh, 'sides, didn't you say something about three times zero being zero? Guess you must be worse than zero then!"

The Uchiha turned to glare at his rival, who was currently laughing and high-fiving Kiba. "You are lucky I'm low on chakra, or else I'd give you the beating of your life."

Naruto snorted dismissively. "Yeah, right. Anyways, since nobody else is up to it, I'll go." He then got up and made his way towards Shino, cracking his knuckles and grinning.

"So... you!" the blond pointed towards his newest target.

"Shino. Shino Aburame," he interjected with a frown.

"Yeah, yeah. You," Naruto shrugged, waving his hand dismissively much to the Aburame's further annoyance. "I guess it's you and me now, huh?" Naruto cracked his knuckles, looking forward to challenging the bug user. Naruto thought that his shadow clones would be able to deal with the kikaichu rather easily, but he also knew the Aburame was, surprisingly for one of his clan, no slouch at taijutsu... which was by far the biggest weak spot in the blond's skillset. It would've made for an interesting fight, he thought.

However, Shino surprised him by declining, despite also being interested. "As much as I'd enjoy sparring with you, I'm afraid that I no longer have enough stamina for this fight. I wouldn't be able to keep fighting for long, especially not against someone as endlessly energetic as yourself."

"Oh man... what now?" The boy slumped, clearly disappointed. "Sakura-chan?"

The girl smirked at him, but not because of him. "No way. I could still fight but... a certain someone who hasn't fought anyone yet," she pointed at Hinata, surprising all of unaware genin that hadn't spotted the girl yet (and Hinata herself), "should be in better shape to give you a good beatdown!" The pinkette winked at the Hyuuga and motioned for her to come over.

Hinata didn't have a chance to say anything because Naruto reacted faster. "You're up already? Awesome! I've been looking forward to fighting you this whole day!" he said, punching his open left hand and giving the girl an excited grin that effectively stopped her on her tracks.

"M-me?!" Hinata's shock was evident, but it wore off quickly when she remembered what Sakura told her at lunch:

 _"You've made an impression on him after what you did to Kakashi-sensei, you know? And if I know that knucklehead, I'd guess that he wants to see how strong you are with his own two eyes."_

"Yeah! And when I beat you, you are going to give me the jutsu you used to defeat Kakashi-sensei!"

Between being somewhat overwhelmed by the blond's excitement and not knowing how to address the multiple misunderstandings he managed to fit in a single sentence, Hinata went silent.

Sakura then tried to support the blunette further from behind Naruto, giving her an encouraging smile and mouthing the words "Go for it!"

On the other hand, Naruto's own smile faltered from seeing that Hinata hadn't properly answered him, or moved. The only thing that differentiated Hinata from a statue was that a statue's face didn't go from white to red without a coat of paint. "Unless... you are still feeling sick? I don't mind leaving this for anoth—"

"N-N-NO!" The girl then blushed harder at her somewhat desperate outburst. "I'm not—I mean... uh..."

 _'What a weirdo.'_ Naruto kept staring quizzically at her, which only made Hinata feel even more foolish.

 _'What am I doing?! Stupid! Focus, Hinata!'_ The blunette then took a deep breath to calm down and walked towards the center of the clearing, stopping in front of Naruto but a fair distance away from him. She then activated her bloodline limit, the Byakugan, and moved into the basic stance of the Gentle Fist.

"I will fight you, Naruto-kun," the girl declared, staring at her crush with all the determination she could muster, though her voice wasn't any louder than normal.

Her features made her look serious and determined, but inside she was squealing like a schoolgirl. _'Yes! I did it! I talked to him without stuttering! ...Maybe we can keep training together in other days until I can... No! No, no, not now! Bad Hinata! Concentrate on the fight..."_ She took another deep breath, repressing the urge to shake her head.

 _'I know I'm horrible with the Jyuuken, but I must defeat him here... I can't look weak in front of Naruto-kun.'_ Memories of her father suddenly flashed through her mind, but she did her best to ignore them.

Naruto grim returned, and to Hinata's credit, her face didn't go past a bright shade of pink upon seeing it. "Heh, now that's what I'm talking about! You ready, Hinata?!"

The girl nodded, and Kurenai walked over, stopping almost between the two. "I guess Hinata has rested enough for this, so I will allow you two to fight." She then gave her student an encouraging smile and jumped away, signaling the beginning of the fight.

Naruto's first instinct was to gather chakra for some shadow clones. Kakashi had warned him before about using jutsu too openly, but he knew there was little choice here. If Hinata was using the Gentle Fist, he couldn't approach her safely... but he wasn't good enough with projectiles to win just with that, so his only option was to overwhelm her before she could do the same to him.

Considering her meek personality, Naruto assumed she'd be more of a defensive fighter and would've waited for him to approach her, but Hinata defied his expectations by immediately rushing towards him.

Hinata was fast, but she wasn't quick enough to deny him the opportunity to complete his jutsu. This made the blond feel more confident, because if he could win against Kiba (who had been fast enough to not allow him to create any clones until the very end of the fight), then he could definitely beat the Hyuuga. Naruto didn't have time to create as many clones as he wanted to, but he was okay with just nine clones for the time being.

Hinata had initially thought that she would be able to counter Naruto's clones with her Byakugan, but much to her surprise, she found out that not even her dojutsu could tell them apart. _'All of them look the same and even have the exact same amount of chakra... I can't lose track of the real one!'_ Hinata decided, drawing a bunch of shuriken from the pouch strapped to her leg and throwing them all at once.

Instead of carefully aiming at a specific target, Hinata chose to cover a wider area in hopes of hitting more than one target at once. This tactic would generally be bad during a fight, but it gave Hinata a chance at defeating the clones while still carefully following the movements of the original.

Her actions prompted the Narutos to jump away in hopes of not being hit. Luckily for the blonds, Hinata's inaccurate attack missed most of them, but three kage bunshin still happened to jump right into the path of a shuriken—a mistake that cost them their lives. The remaining members of the Naruto Squad then charged to meet the Hyuuga head-on, hoping to overcome her superior taijutsu with sheer numbers before she could dispel too many of them.

What Naruto didn't know was that he had been right before: Hinata was indeed a defensive fighter. Though "excelled" might be too strong of a word, the girl was more inclined to dodging and countering with quick strikes instead of pursuing and pressuring foes to control the pace of the match as her martial art of choice suggested. Naruto was the exact opposite, being a more offensive fighter whose fighting style revolved around rushing at the enemy and delivering powerful, telegraphed punches and kicks.

Thanks to the Kage Bunshin no Jutsu, Naruto had the option of launching multiple attacks at once and from different directions which mitigated the lack of speed of his attacks, but against an opponent such as Hinata, that strategy didn't work out as well as it usually did. The girl avoided every single one of Naruto's strikes, making use of her agility and the 360 degrees vision granted by the Byakugan to come out of the scuffle unscathed.

 _'I'm doing well!'_ Hinata thought happily, her confidence boosted after striking two more clones and reducing Naruto's army to half of its original numbers. Then the girl's eyes widened once she realized the position she now found herself in. _'They... they surrounded me! This isn't so good anymore, is it?'_

While Hinata had managed to dodge Naruto's attacks, she had to concentrate on them to do so, which meant that clones that weren't trying to harm her weren't given too much attention during the brief confrontation. Rather than trying to attack again, some of the clones decided to put some distance between themselves and the Hyuuga, and the girl obliviously put herself in a position where the remaining five Narutos could trap her. Her problems didn't stop there, though.

 _'I don't know which Naruto is the real one anymore... all of them still have the same amount of chakra, but... now they have more? Why is this...?'_

But before Hinata was able to realize that destroying a clone sent most of its chakra back to the user and remaining clones in equal amounts, Naruto made his move. Drawing a few kunai and shuriken, he and his clones used Hinata's own strategy against her and threw the sharp projectiles at the cornered girl.

Hinata reacted as fast as she could, blazing through a few hand seals and managing to avoid the projectiles, leaving them to strike a wooden log that she had exchanged herself with thanks to the Substitution Jutsu. This also had the bonus of forcing some clones to dodge the few shuriken that actually missed the log and almost killed them; dying from friendly fire would be pretty pathetic, after all.

"Damn, kawarimi?!"

"Where is she?!"

"Augh, I _hate_ this jutsu!"

"Quick, protect me!" one of the Narutos exclaimed, and idea forming in his mind. His fellow Uzumaki quickly caught on to what he was planning and organized a loose diamond formation around him, effectively acting as a shield and as a pseudo-Byakugan that was able to scan the area around him.

"...She isn't here, boss!" One of the clones said, after briefly looking around realizing the bluenette wasn't near any of him, with the other clones finding the same results soon afterwards.

Before they could decide on another plan, the Naruto that was facing the woods where Shino and Sakura were previously fighting caught a glimpse of a cream-colored blur approaching them from above, but he was too late to warn his companions.

Landing right inside of the formation and behind the Naruto who was on the center, Hinata aimed a decisive palm thrust at the boy's back. Her attack had no chakra, since she obviously wasn't trying to kill him, but Hinata knew Kurenai would call the match if she landed a good hit on Naruto's torso, since that would be killing blow if it had chakra.

However, it was Hinata's turn to be surprised, because the Naruto that she attacked blew up in a cloud of smoke. _'They were protecting a clone? But why?! Unless...!'_

Realizing she had been tricked and regretting not going with her initial idea of stomping the central Naruto, the Hyuuga quickly struck the 3 Narutos that she could hit from her current position, but sadly for her, they were all clones too.

Thanks to her dojutsu, she was able to notice the remaining Naruto—undoubtedly the real one—coming at her, his arm wound back in preparation for a strong punch. Hinata was still in the middle of her third palm thrust when she detected him, which left her in a bad position to dodge the incoming attack. Still, she attempted to pivot away from his attack, and while her maneuver managed to save her from bearing the brunt of the punch, it still struck her lower right ribs with a decent amount of power.

Running on a burst of adrenaline that came from trying to salvage her failed ambush, Hinata still managed to try for a counterattack before the pain really registered. Quickly, she struck the muscles of the upper part of his forearm with two fingers before the damage he dealt to her ribs made itself known to her.

Naruto quickly disengaged once he felt the burning sting of Hinata's chakra-enhanced attack, jumping away before she could go for more hits. Luckily, Hinata's desperate strike managed to miss the pressure points of the shoulder and the elbow, so while that part of his body was left numb, he still had full control of the limb.

Hinata, too, had jumped backwards after hitting him. "The way you used your c-clones was v-very clever..." she complimented him, cradling her wounded rib as she spoke. _'This will definitely leave a bruise.'_

Naruto smirked, though having observed him for a long time, she could see it was a strained smirk, likely from the pain of her chakra running through his arm. "Heh, thanks. By the way, from where did you come from? I had clones all around me and I only saw you at the last second!"

"Um, from the t-trees... I used a chakra-jump," she panted.

The two stared at each other for a few seconds, and Hinata used the opportunity to catch her breath. They had started only a while but and she was starting to feel winded. _'I am more agile than him and my blows are stronger thanks to the Gentle Fist, but... this isn't enough!_ _At this rate, he will just outlast_ _me. I need to find an opening!'_

The thought of losing to Naruto terrified her. Deep down, she knew that the results of this fight would matter very little in the long run, but a big part of her subconsciously feared that Naruto would turn his back on her if she failed, much like her clan did. Perhaps if she knew advanced Gentle Fist techniques such as the Hakkeshou Kaiten she would feel more confident in herself since more options would be available, but sadly for her, she had nothing more than the basics to rely on. That is, until her poor stamina decided the match's outcome for her.

Naruto also had used his time to regroup. He wasn't tired like his opponent, but he needed a new plan and fast. _'Damn, that hurt...! I'm not good enough at taijutsu to deal with a Hyuuga, even with clones. I will need to take her by surprise but... how?! The Byakugan can see through anything I could try against someone else!_ '

As it was, the fight was quickly becoming frustrating for Naruto. Maybe if he had better control of his chakra he would've been able to create enough clones to overwhelm the girl without losing too much time to concentrate chakra, but right now that wasn't a possibility. He wouldn't be able to run from her long enough to do his kinjutsu, either.

Seeing no other option, Naruto grabbed a kunai from his pouch and charged at Hinata, prompting her to assume the Gentle Fist stance once again. _'I have to increase my range if I don't want to be hit like that again!'_ It wasn't the best plan ever, since he'd be fighting her at close-quarters, but letting Hinata attack first would just make things worse because his defenses weren't good, so he had to take the initiative.

Naruto swung at her chest once he was close enough, but Hinata leaned backwards slightly, narrowly avoiding the attack. Seeing the opening left by his wide swing, she entered his range in order to finish the fight, but the Byakugan allowed Hinata to see that Naruto was trying to salvage his failed attack with a backhand. In response to that, she used her fingers to attack his right shoulder instead of taking a free shot at his torso.

 _'Shit!'_

Thanks to Hinata's Jyuuken strike hitting the worst possible area, Naruto's entire right arm became too damaged to be reliable, which resulted in his kunai falling to the ground. Naruto then desperately jumped away from her to try to avoid more pain, but Hinata gave chase and struck his chest just as he landed, adding to his backward momentum and sending the blond to the ground, leaving him sprawled on the grass.

But on the grass he did not remain, getting up almost immediately after falling. "I'm not done yet!"

"Yes you are," Kurenai corrected from somewhere behind him, surprising the boy. "Hinata didn't use any chakra on that last hit, but it would've severely harmed you if she had, so the victory goes to her."

Seeing that Hinata had deactivated her Byakugan, Naruto let out a frustrated sigh, unsatisfied with the match's results. Feeling like he could've gone for a rematch and that his performance wasn't as good as it should've been, he then crouched to grab the kunai that he had dropped to the ground, using his non-dominant hand to do so since his right arm wasn't cooperating with him. _'And now I lost the chance to learn a new jutsu, too. Awesome...'_

Meanwhile, Hinata watched him uneasily. While she was happy and relieved that she ended up being victorious, seeing her crush's sulking damped her mood and even made her feel a little guilty.

"Uh... a-are you alright?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah! Don't worry about my shoulder; Kurenai-sensei can heal me," he assured the worried-looking Hyuuga with a wide smile, shrugging off the wound as if it didn't even hurt. The idea that Hinata might've been concerned with his emotional well-being or that she could see through his fake smile never crossed his mind.

"S-Sorry," she apologized to Naruto as he got up from the ground, but refused to meet his eyes when he sent an inquisitive look at her.

"What...? Why are you saying sorry? You won fair and square, and didn't even have that much trouble during the fight, so..." Naruto trailed off, confused by the direction the conversation was going.

"Ah, t-thank you..." Normally Hinata's face wouldn't have remained in its usual pale shade, but the realization that Naruto was feeling a bit down because of his inability to keep up with her kept the blush away.

Assuming that she had nothing more to say, Naruto turned to join the others, since he'd have to wait a while for his next turn, but he quickly turned around when he heard Hinata talking again.

"I... I hope w-we can fight again someday... and y-you did well, too." She then bowed slightly, showing respect to her defeated opponent, earning a surprised wide-eyed stare from him as a result.

Once the shock of being acknowledged—despite _losing_ —wore off, another smile formed on his face. "Just you wait, next time I will definitely beat you!" he promised to his newest rival, feeling an odd sense of deja vu.

The sight of Naruto smiling at her was enough to make her heart speed up and her face turn red, like usual, but the nervousness of being the center of his attention wasn't enough to stop her from returning the smile this time.

She knew that acknowledging him would've made him feel a little better, but enough bring out one of Naruto's rare genuine smiles? Hinata never thought that she of all people would manage to do that, but it did, and it made her feel butterflies in her stomach and gave her enough courage to look straight into Naruto's eyes.

But the moment was short-lived, as Hinata snapped out of her trance when someone placed a hand on her shoulder. Turning her head, Hinata discovered that it was Sakura.

"Let others have their turn before trying for a rematch, Naruto." The pink-haired girl then smiled at Hinata and offered a few shuriken to her. "Here, those are yours, and stay right there. Naruto! I got yours too," Sakura shouted, running after the blond and giving him what appeared to be the shuriken that Hinata had evaded earlier.

"Thanks, Sakura-chan! You're the best!"

"Right, right... you did well out there, but go get that shoulder healed!" she ordered sternly, and being a good boy that did not like to be punched, Naruto obeyed immediately.

Sakura then turned around. "Now, let's see if I can't avenge my teammate, huh?"

The pinkette's wink told Hinata that the pinkette approved of her performance, but the girl's expression became serious soon afterwards, their fight starting not much longer after that

Sakura's taijutsu was much harder to deal with than Naruto's, even when considering his shadow clones, but Hinata's Byakugan made Sakura unable to make use of bunshin and illusions, which eventually resulted in her defeat since Sakura's main strategies were useless. Hinata did have quite a bit of fun, though.

Hinata's next challenger was none other than Sasuke Uchiha, who had been looking forward to fighting the one person that had given trouble to his entire team so far, Kakashi included. Hinata wasn't feeling confident about fighting the class genius, but Kiba and Naruto managed to encourage her to give her all, despite her doubts. As such, she managed to put a decent fight thanks to getting a good hit to his arm early on and because Sasuke was clearly unfamiliar with the Gentle Fist, but the boy started taking her seriously after that mistake and Hinata found herself unable to keep up with the Uchiha's overwhelming taijutsu once he adapted to her style, even if he had trouble using his left arm during the fight.

The rest of the day wasn't very different, with the genin fighting between themselves and sometimes in teams or pairs, receiving compliments and critics from the two jonin. Hinata's favorite fight was the last one, when Shino finally decided to accept Naruto's earlier challenge. The two managed to bring the fight to the woods, and while her fellow genin were unable to watch the fight from there, Hinata's Byakugan wasn't hindered by a few trees.

Naruto proved to be much more difficult to catch than Sakura, especially when shadow clones kept entering the fray, and to add to the Aburame's list of troubles, the blond had far too much chakra to be bothered by the kikaichu trying to drain him dry. However, their tracking abilities allowed Shino to outmaneuver Naruto's clones and ambush the real one, winning the fight after a lot of hard work. Hinata had been a bit sad that Naruto had lost, but the duel had been exciting enough to make up for that—an opinion that she noted guiltily that her crush seemed to share.

After that Sasuke decided to fight the Aburame, but Kakashi banned his Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu in order to ensure that Shino's bug colony wouldn't take huge losses right before the mission. But Shino, too prideful to fight Sasuke with a handicap, refused the fight.

Seeing that the sun was almost down already, Kurenai and Kakashi decided to stop training for the day right there and let the genin go back to their homes, though not before giving a few general warnings about the next day's mission (like showing up on time and checking their equipment) before disappearing with body flickers.

After saying goodbye to her teammates, Hinata went back into the wooded edge of the training ground to grab her bag, which had been forgotten for the past few hours. On her way back, though, she saw the three members of Team 7 near the three wooden posts and overheard an interesting conversation.

"Boys, wait!" Sakura called her teammates, who were already leaving the area.

"Eh? Sakura-chan?" Unlike Naruto, Sasuke said nothing, but he also stopped to give Sakura his attention.

"Um, about what Kurenai-sensei said to us... we need to talk about it." Sakura was clearly feeling awkward, but she knew that this conversation needed to happen. Team 8 had taught her that talking could be good for the team, even if the people involved really didn't want to do it.

"What else is there to say? I think she said everything that needed to be said already." Sasuke retorted.

"But _we_ haven't. And I think we can't just leave this alone like that." Taking a deep breath, Sakura proceeded, looking down at first. "Look, I... I know that I haven't been the best teammate ever. I'm not treating you two like you deserve, and I don't have any special jutsu or abilities to really make a difference, but I want you two to know that from today forward, I won't be useless again!"

The intensity on her voice caught both of her teammates (and their eavesdropper) off-guard, but Sakura didn't wait for them to recover. "I don't know how to make an army of clones or how to shoot fireballs, but I promise that I will find a way to really help you guys during battles! And... and I will try to be a better friend to you two, too."

"You're selling yourself short," Sasuke stated, much to Sakura's utter shock. Quite frankly, he still doubted her ability to keep up with him or Naruto, but insulting her now would probably be detrimental to her growth, so he didn't share what he truly thought about her. Naruto had no such problems, however. That, and...

"Yeah, Sasuke's right. You're really smart, you know? We would've still been chasing that cat if you weren't there to help us come with a plan. Stupid cat..." Naruto was pleasantly surprised when that managed to get a laugh out of Sakura.

"Heh, probably. It was a good idea to use Naruto's clones to corner the cat in the forest." Sasuke smirked, but got serious when he saw Sakura recovering from her laughter. "But I haven't been doing my part either. I... I am sorry for forgetting that we are just amateurs."

The Uchiha looked away from his teammates after seeing their confused expressions, almost spotting Hinata from her hiding spot behind a tree in the process. "I thought that you two would just hold me back, but... I saw you two just as the weak genin that you are now rather than the strong ninja that you could become in the future. And... I forgot that being the best genin of our year still means that I'm just a genin... and nothing more than that," he finished, his last words barely more than a whisper.

Instead of looking proud and arrogant like he usually does, Sasuke looked ashamed and... haunted. Though Hinata was clueless about what he had said or what was making him feel so depressed, his teammates had an idea of what was passing through his head.

Sakura had seen Sasuke at his worst, begging his brother for answers while holding on to what little strength he had to keep living. Naruto managed to miss that thanks to being tossed into the lake (even though he did the math on his own later), but Sakura saw it happen. And she decided that she absolutely hated seeing the grief reflected on the boy's onyx eyes.

But just when she was about to try to comfort him, Naruto spoke up. "Yeah... you are right. We are only genin, but one day, I know that we will be strong enough to fight him."

"What...?" Sasuke looked up. "You mean my brother?"

Naruto nodded, looking more serious than Sasuke could've ever remembered seeing. "It... It will take a while for..." he took a deep breath, "for me to catch up to you, but I will be there with you when you finally get the chance to avenge your clan!"

The blond then extended his fist towards Sasuke. "That's my promise to you, and I never go back on my word."

"I..." Sasuke stared at Naruto's hand, too shocked by the blond's declaration to do anything else.

"I promise too!" Sakura piped in. "I can't let you guys have all of the fun, can I?"

Naruto looked like he had something else to say in response to that, but the words died on his mouth when he felt something touching his hand: Sasuke's fist.

"Thank you."

Sasuke didn't say anything else, both because he couldn't form the words, and because he felt that no other words were needed. His small, but sincere, smile was all that Sakura and Naruto really needed to understand how he felt.

And maybe... maybe it was really time to let other people into his life, Sasuke wondered. Maybe this time they wouldn't go away on the blink of an eye, leaving him with nothing but hatred to keep him from killing himself.

Sakura then gripped their hands with her own, blushing a bit at the thought that she was holding Sasuke's hand but managing to keep her inner fangirl in check for the time being. "You know... I still dislike Kurenai-sensei for what she did, but I am glad that it happened. But from now on, we will need to work hard to be the best team ever!"

Sakura's wide smile soon was matched by Naruto's. "Heh, of course we will be the best! Can't be the best Hokage ever if my team isn't of the same quality, right?"

Smiling warmly at the scene that she had just witnessed, Hinata quietly left Training Ground 3, happy that Team 7 was becoming more united than before. She went unnoticed by all but a certain Hiruzen Sarutobi, who was also watching the scene via his crystal ball.

Similarly to the Hyuuga heiress, Hiruzen was also smiling. As he watched the interaction between Kakashi's genin, he could feel in his heart that they would be returning to Konoha safe and sound. "I shouldn't have worried so much," he chided himself, remembering the Will of Fire. "This next generation... they surely will bring about a bright future for Konoha."

* * *

A/N:

Hey! That took a while...

I hope that you guys enjoyed this prologue arc despite the slow beginning, but as you can see, I had my reasons for doing things like that. Now, Team 7 is starting anew, and both Naruto and Sasuke are starting to see the girls that have a crush on them in a new light, too. How these events will impact the plot of "Naruto" is what we will be dealing with from now on.

The only big thing left to address is Naruto keeping the Kyuubi hidden from his team. This will be briefly touched on the next chapter, but there will be more about it only by the end of the Wave arc.

As for Naruhina... I will be developing their bond throughout the next few arcs. Like I said in the first chapter, this will not be a fast process. I am aiming for a realistic progression, and right now, Hinata has a strong crush on Naruto and wants to form a bond with the person that inspired her so much. Naruto just sees Hinata as an weird, awkward but seemingly kind person and nothing much more than that. They still need time and "events" to see more sides of each other and develop their budding friendship and stronger feelings, and the beginning of these developments will be in the Wave arc.

Talking about that... my Wave arc will take slightly longer than the normal one, because I have more characters in the arc and I will be making use of a few training days that canon skipped over to develop the friendships between the main pairing, Team 7 and the little alliance that the girls formed. This doesn't mean that the other genin will be ignored, though.

But the people from the Land of Waves itself might not receive as much focus. Inari's character arc in particular, especially since his backstory will not get a whole chapter for itself like how it got an entire episode in the anime. I'm sure people don't care that much about them, at any rate, but I also won't completely ignore them. The arc loses its impact when people ignore Inata and such, which is something various fanfic authors fail to grasp.

In terms of action scenes, expect some at the beginning and end of the arc. The middle of the arc will be a bit bigger and with no fight scenes, like I said, but I think you guys will still enjoy it (if you have enjoyed the fic thus far, that is).

One thing people might be worried is about training sections. In the future, I will only give them some focus if there is character development or relevant new techniques/principles to be introduced. Otherwise, they will only be mentioned if they are REALLY necessary, from a plot or writing perspective.

Lastly, I have to talk about my update schedule. Bi-weekly updates were a great idea when I thought that the 10 chapters that I had completed were good enough to be posted and when I thought that this past semester would've been easy (talking about college).

I was wrong in both accounts. My chapters were absurdly bad at first, and I not only had to rewrite them, but I almost doubled the word count for most of them in doing so. This meant that I didn't get anything done past what I already had before posting, and I had less time to write thanks to college. My intention was to keep writing the new stuff, so by now I should've had up to chapter 17 or so ready.

I will also be forced to get a job soon, so I will have even less time to devote on my fic. I could handle tri-weekly updates, but I still want to have chapters done ahead of time and more time to devote to other hobbies... so I will now be updating the fic on a monthly basis for the time being. This also gives me some time to completely ignore the fic by the time my tests start popping up, which indirectly gives me more time to work on this by the end of the semester. I think I will be able to return to bi-weekly updates (or tri-weekly) at some point in this year, but... not anytime soon. Perhaps only when I finish college, which will be at the end of 2017.

I deeply apologize for breaking my promise about starting the Wave arc in this month, but I'd rather leave you guys angry because of a small delay rather than because of crappy quality. I hope that you guys understand, and once again I apologize.

Now then... I believe this is all that I had to say. Thanks for reading everything so far! I hope that you guys will still be here when I post Chapter 7. This will happen on January 10th. I'd love to get more reviews/favorites/follows, but knowing that people will still be reading and enjoying this is enough for me.

And, of course, then this site suddenly stops tracking views because of a glitch. AWESOME. I hope the views will be "returned" eventually...

Anyways, see you all next year! I hope this update suffices as a small early Christmas present...

*Also, credits to _**Serious Sam**_ for suggesting something to me in a review, something that I'm still kicking myself over for not implementing in this chapter from the get-go.

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.0.1 (03/19/2016)

Modified Hiruzen's part a bit based on a conversation with _Yasha-HebiHime_ and added a period that had been missing.

1.0.1 to 2.0 (07/14/2016)

The usual 2.0 changes you would have been familiar with by now if you bothered reading these notes. Nothing big, but a chapter-wide clean up.


	7. Chapter 7 - Beyond Konoha's Gates

Hello, everyone!

First of all, I must say that I'm amazed by how well-received my fic was. I've got a lot of really good reviews as well as other compliments in PM answers, and they made me super happy! I mean, right now I have over 150 followers, as well as almost 100 favorites and 50 reviews...

Special shout-outs to _gio08, Chewie Cookies, Meow382, Sashu,_ _ **Serious Sam**_ _, and RyoshiMorino_ for reviews that made my day! In particular, extra thanks to _gio08_ and _Chewie Cookies_ for posting a review for every chapter/update! (And though it came all at once, the same goes for _Sashu_!)

Though... I'm also worried if I will be able to keep posting satisfactory chapters like I (supposedly) have been doing... I mean, from now on I will start working with the canon arcs, so yeah. Unlike the prologue arc, you guys now have a very, very good idea of many things that will happen... and it goes double for this specific chapter, since Kakashi and Kurenai already know the big plot twist about the people chasing after Tazuna and stuff.

Another thing about this chapter... Despite the main draw of this fic being Naruhina, this chapter focuses mainly on the OTHER pairing we will be dealing a bit more in-depth during the story, which is Sasusaku. Mostly we will be dealing with Sakura today, so yeah. I promise more Naruhina during the coming chapters, indirectly (like in chapter 2 and 3, and the Sakura/Hinata conversation) and directly.

Also, there's a small OC in this chapter. Please don't mind him. He also goes unnamed, but I explain why in the ending A/N.

One last, important note: As far as this story is concerned, the original introduction arc of Naruto (from the first chapter til Team 7 officially becomes a thing) happened in late March (because that is more or less when the school year ends in Japan), so right now it's early April.

Anyways, sorry for being long-winded... and enjoy the chapter! (Hopefully there aren't too many mistakes...)

* * *

 _The Land of Waves_

 _Chapter 7 – Beyond Konoha's Gates (Current Version: 2.0)_

* * *

It was just a little after 7 a.m when Sakura sluggishly approached the northeastern gates of the village, one of the many pairs of wooden doors that separated Konoha from the forests that surrounded it.

After yawning, stretching and rubbing her eyes, the girl tried to mask the sleepiness from her features as best as she could and proceeded with her walk, hoping that nobody would comment on the black circles around her eyes. Having already seen herself in the mirror today, she knew better than to expect nobody would notice them, and the guards at the gate seemed to have seen that detail as well.

On the road just outside the gate, she saw that all members of Team 8 were already waiting for her, talking between themselves while watching as Kurenai checked their backpacks to see if they had forgotten to bring anything, despite all of them insisting that they hadn't.

Sasuke was a few feet away from the trio, outside of the road, but he was watching Team 8's conversation with surprising interest. Shockingly enough, Kakashi was already there too, reading his favorite porn book (which was not so shocking) while leaning against a nearby tree.

Lastly, Tazuna was also with them, scowling at Kiba while rubbing his own temples. _'Hmm... I guess he has a hangover. Sheesh, if he is this pissed with just the mutt, I wonder how cranky he will be once Naruto gets here,'_ the girl thought, noticing that her blond teammate was the only missing member of their party now that she arrived.

After greeting everyone, Sakura immediately made a beeline for Sasuke, like she was used to. After taking no more than three steps forward, the Uchiha made eye contact with her, freezing her on the spot.

Hurriedly, Sakura changed her mind and turned to talk with Hinata instead... but after glancing at her, she saw that the blue-haired girl was still busy talking with her teammates. Looking back at Sasuke, who had an eyebrow raised at her in silent questioning of her unusual behavior, she realized she had little choice but to go with her first plan and continued to walk towards him.

There was one problem with that plan, which is why she considered aborting it in the first place: she had no idea of how to properly interact with Sasuke after the previous day's events.

Kurenai had implied that she needed to take her role—no, her profession—more seriously and that she needed to change how to approach Sasuke if she truly wanted to have a relationship with him one day. Fighting and training, with or without Sasuke, wasn't that hard. But staying around him without entering "fangirl mode", as she had heard Kiba describing it once when they were at the academy (a mistake that earned him a good clobbering), that was the real challenge. Kurenai had merely said to her that she was doing it wrong, but there were no hints as to what the "right way" was supposed to be.

In the end she just stayed by his side, looking at the ground glumly. Unknowingly to her, Sasuke was struggling with practically the same issue, except with the added bonus of not knowing what to think of being practically ignored by his teammate. As annoying as he found it, Sakura's incessant chattering was something he grew used to and he had actually expected it. He wouldn't say that he missed it, but it was definitely unsettling not having the girl fawning over him.

With both of them not knowing how to act around each other, but feeling that they should be having a conversation deeper than "good morning" and "hn", the silence between then grew tense and awkward. That is, until Sasuke glanced at Sakura once she yawned for the fourth time in the past ten minutes and noticed the dark circles around her eyes when she was busy rubbing them.

"Did you have trouble sleeping last night?"

"Eh?" Sakura mumbled intelligently before realizing that, yes, Sasuke had just initiated a conversation with her, and no, it wasn't just because he was asking her to punch Naruto for the blond to shut up.

"Oh! Um, kinda... I didn't have trouble last night per se, but I woke up early because of a nightmare and it took me a while to get back to sleep..." Realization flashed in her features, which were soon hidden after she buried her face into her hands. "I look horrible, don't I?" the pinkette groaned.

While part of Sakura was indeed worried about her appearance and now regretted her choice to not wear any makeup before going out, her real intention was to subtly change the subject. She didn't mean to mention her nightmare, but between being surprised that Sasuke was willingly talking with her and the fact that she was still drowsy, the words escaped her mouth before she could hold herself back.

Had she been looking at his eyes instead of looking away while faking exasperation, Sakura would have noticed a rare softness in Sasuke's gaze. "It was about that genjutsu, wasn't it?"

 _'Welp, that didn't work... it backfired completely.'_ Sighing, the girl uncovered her face and glanced at him for a moment before dropping eye contact and staring at the ground again. "Yeah... yeah, it was."

Her nightmare hadn't been much different from what Kurenai showed to her with the World of Nightmares genjutsu, but there was one key difference: Sakura realized that she was in a genjutsu, but she couldn't break out of it.

As a result, she was forced to watch Itachi's Great Fireball hit Sasuke, turning him into a molten corpse that she had the pleasure of seeing first-hand thanks to the older Uchiha's use of a Suiton jutsu to put out the fire. The man then slowly started to walk towards her, mocking her for being a burden during the fight and, after seeing her attempt to dispel the illusion by biting her own tongue, he mocked her for not being able to break out of a simple genjutsu.

Though Sakura still tried to run away, Itachi caught her by the hair, broke her limbs and then stabbed her multiple times with his tanto before leaving her to bleed out in the grass. The girl's pained screams and pleas for help resounded through Training Ground 3 the entire time, but nobody heard her.

The memory still made Sakura shudder, which didn't go unnoticed by Sasuke.

"Er... do... do you want to talk about it?" Sasuke offered, hoping that maybe he'd be able to cheer her up somehow if she was a bit more open. That worked nicely for Kiba and Shino when dealing with Hinata yesterday, after all...

"Thank you Sasuke-kun," she said with a tired smile, "but... just forget I said anything, ok?" Sasuke's eyes narrowed, but he nodded and turned away, giving her some space for the time being, much to girl's relief. While Sakura was truly appreciative of his efforts to lift her spirits, the attempt only made she feel worse on the inside.

Unlike her dream version, the real Sakura's screams didn't go by unheard. Sakura's parents heard her voice and immediately barged into her room, fearing for their precious little flower's safety. Though they were relieved that she was just having a nightmare instead of being attacked by someone, they weren't pleased by the fact that Sakura completely refused to talk about what had haunted her in her dreams, considering how shaken the girl still was afterwards.

Nonetheless, her mother had offered her a hug and comforting words that assured Sakura that it had been nothing more than a nightmare, while her father was busy brewing a cup of chamomile tea to help her calm down.

She was very thankful for their support, but then she remembered what Kurenai had told her before:

 _"You, on the other hand, have a much less turbulent life. This won't be for long; your career will inevitably leave you broken sooner or later—all of you—but your teammates don't have a family or friends to support them when they break."_

It was only then that Sakura realized how lucky she truly was. Because, unlike her, Sasuke had nobody to comfort him after his nightmares... and no one to tell him that it wasn't real. And that was, in fact, the reason he didn't have someone to support him to begin with... because the nightmares were his reality, no matter if he was asleep or not.

Knowing that made her feel like she had no right to be this affected by something that hadn't even truly happened. And it became worse once Sasuke offered his help because, to Sakura, bothering him with her problems would be just selfish of her, considering what he had gone through that night and likely every other night since then.

But after being comforted by her parents and even by Sasuke, Sakura also realized the true meaning behind another thing Kurenai had said to her. _'So... this is what she meant by supporting them out of battle, huh? I need to be there for Sasuke-kun... oh! That's right, of course.'_ Her eyes then detected an orange dot rapidly approaching them from within the village. There was only one thing in the entirety of Konoha that had the guts to wear that garish shade of _neon_ orange, of course. _'And then there is Naruto too... this might be a problem,'_ Sakura thought as she glanced at Hinata, who was still talking with her teammates.

"I believe that Naruto will arrive within the next two minutes," Shino stated after his bugs started to react to the one he had tagged Naruto with previously. He could've detected Naruto earlier, but the conversation with his teammates had distracted him.

Kiba sniffed the air and, detecting a familiar smell that was suspiciously similar to that of ramen, nodded to Shino. "Yeah, that's him for sure. And 'bout damn time!"

"B-but you were just as late yesterday, Kiba-kun," Hinata reminded, doing her best to keep her features as neutral as possible.

"Because of him," Kiba growled, frowning as he remembered the trouble that he went through because of Naruto's clumsiness. Hinata had no counterargument for that.

Like Shino said, it didn't take long for Naruto to catch up to the group.

"Hey...!" The boy waved at them once he was close enough to see them, as if his clothing wasn't enough to grab everyone's attention. "Whew... Sorry for being late, guys."

"You are an embarrassment to ninja everywhere."

"Shut up, Kakashi-sensei! I don't want to hear that from you of all people!" Naruto angrily pointed at the silver-haired man, who was in the process of pocketing his book.

"While I do agree with you, Naruto," Kurenai said, glaring a bit at Kakashi before shifting her eyes to meet the blond's. "You better have a good reason for not being on time like we asked you to."

Naruto smiled nervously at the kunoichi. "I was trying to find the landlady of my apartment building. I needed to find someone to take care of my plants while I was gone, you know?"

"You could have just left a Shadow Clone to search in your stead," Shino remarked dryly, annoyed by the fact that Naruto wasted his time because of mere bug food.

"Clones dispel way too easily for me to trust them with something so important," Naruto disagreed, mentally kicking himself for not thinking about using some to help him with his search. If it took twenty minutes with only one Naruto, that meant he could've done it in a single minute if he made twenty clones.

Meanwhile, Hinata was mentally going over what she had just heard. _'So his plants are important to him? This... this is wonderful! Perhaps he might be interested in flowers and herbs too? I absolutely must remember to bring this up in a future conversation!'_ Talking to Naruto might not be so hard if the subject was one of her hobbies after all. _'Though... I am surprised that someone as energetic and impatient as Naruto-kun likes this kind of activity.'_

"Are you serious, Kurenai-sensei?!" Naruto's loud voice snapped Hinata out of her musings.

"I am," Kurenai sighed. "Did you truly not notice the memories?"

"From what I observed during yesterday's fights, Naruto's clones always act in conjunction with the original. Thus, the memories wouldn't stand out to him because they would match his actual experience." Shino stated.

"Makes sense," Naruto agreed, scratching his chin in a pensive manner before dropping the pose for an excited fox-like grin. "Heh, I thought it was impossible, but the Shadow Clone Jutsu just got even more awesome than before! Sweet!"

As Naruto laughed satisfactorily from the discovery, Tazuna found his headache getting worse... and not just because of the blond's loudness. "Now that the orange brat is finally here and finally learned how to actually use his fancy ninjutsu, can we get going already? I'd like to get home before lunch tomorrow."

"We will be off soon, Tazuna-san," Kurenai assured, "but we still have a few things to do before moving out so that our trip will be safer."

The old man scowled. "Couldn't you have done them while we were waiting for the brat to show up?"

"Naruto is the key to those extra safety measures, so no, we couldn't," Kakashi answered, offering the man one of his eye-smiles, with the actual smile beneath his mask only growing larger when he saw the annoyance in Tazuna's face and the dumbfounded expression Naruto had.

"Wait, me?"

Kakashi and Kurenai then proceeded to explain to a confused Naruto and the rest of the group about the plan that they came up with after leaving Tazuna inside the hotel yesterday:

First, Naruto was to create five kage bunshin, and four of them would then transform into the remaining members of Team 7 as well as Tazuna. These clones would be travelling ahead of the main group and would act as decoys in case enemies appeared. A few of Shino's bugs would be stealthily accompanying them from the security of the forests that surrounded the road they would be using for the better part of the trip.

Hinata would then need to activate her Byakugan and watch the clones until they were but a few meters away from the edge of her extended field of vision. At that point, the group would then begin their journey and, from five-to-five minutes, she would be activating her dojutsu again to briefly scan the whole area around the clones and the main group.

Shino's bugs would be the decoy group's fixed scouts, checking the area directly around them (and ahead of them, beyond Hinata's range) at all times to warn Shino if there was an enemy approaching. The insects would also have another job: undermining any possible enemies in case the clones are ambushed. Of course, in such an evnet, the clones would also send their memories back to Naruto once they have been "killed". Between that and the fact that Hinata would be watching the fight once Shino detects any enemies, Teams 7 and 8 would be able to acquire intel on their foes and thus, would be better prepared to deal with the incoming threat.

"Isn't this a _bit_ too much just to avoid some bandits? I mean, I could always just track them by smell before they even get the chance to approach if we even find some," Kiba suggested, a bit hurt to have been left out of the plan. It was almost as if Naruto was in Team 8 over him, which greatly bothered him.

"Like I said to Team 7 yesterday, one can _never_ be too prepared for a mission. Anything can happen, and if we have the means to better protect our client and ourselves, then we should make use of them," Kurenai lectured.

She knew, however, that they weren't doing all that they could to reinforce Tazuna's safety, but both she and Kakashi decided that using her bigger invisibility illusions and Kakashi's summoned dogs would be a waste of chakra if they entered a fight, not to mention that it would tip off the kids that something really was wrong with the mission. _'If Kiba is already suspicious, the others must be as well,'_ she noted, observing the other genin as Naruto's clones were transforming into the people they were meant to impersonate.

Sasuke and Shino looked as stoic as ever, but both were starting to suspect that something was off about the operation already. Hinata was a bit on the edge as the reality that she was directly responsible for Tazuna's life started to sink in, while Naruto was focusing most of his energies on gushing over the awesomeness of his favorite jutsu, much to the bridge builder's chagrin. That didn't mean he wasn't a bit nervous, but you'd never be able to tell it just by looking at his face.

Sakura, however, was the one that worried Kurenai, since the pink-haired girl was starting to become visibly scared of the situation she was in, as well as of the potential ways the mission could go wrong. Most of the scenarios Sakura could imagine were only repeats of the thoughts that kept her awake for almost two hours after her nightmare ended.

Those were the same thoughts that Sakura's imagination unwillingly crafted for the girl for the next three hours of their journey, which at the very least kept her drowsiness at bay.

As the group walked through the forested road that separated Konoha from a small beach from where one of Tazuna's friends would be waiting for them with a boat, she tried to think about other topics, but eventually her mind always ended up going back to the mission and how things could get worse from there. Another thing that tormented her was the fact that she'd likely not be very useful to her team in any those cases.

The girl released a silent sigh, shaking her head. _'This is driving me crazy! I need to talk with someone... maybe that will finally distract me.'_ She then looked at Hinata again, and not only the girl was currently focused on scanning the area around them with her Byakugan, but the topics she wanted to talk about with the shy Hyuuga would be impossible to broach with everyone else nearby.

"So, er, Tazuna-san?" Kiba started talking, much to Sakura's relief. "Why didn't you hire ninja from your own country?"

"Yeah! I mean, sure, we are the best ninja you could've ever hired," Naruto boasted, "but Konoha's kinda stingy with the prices for missions."

Sakura snorted. _'Oh, Naruto, Kiba... god bless your sweet, ignorant souls,'_ she snarked happily.

"Tch, our country is far too small to need a ninja village, boys." Tazuna scoffed, wondering if Gatou would've even tried to go to the Land of Waves if they had ninja to fall back on.

"What do you mean?" both boys asked in unison.

"Hidden villages are part of a given country's military," Kurenai explained, "and they are unique from other villages because the Daimyos actually help to fund them instead of leaving them to grow on their own. They take a good amount of money to fund and maintain and are not worth the cost if the country is small and is in relatively little danger of going to war. For example..."

The Genjutsu Mistress continued to share her knowledge about the geopolitical and economical aspects of the Land of Fire and other countries of the continent. Her lecture was engaging enough to hold everyone's interest throughout the entire explanation, especially when it eventually touched the topic of wars and, consequently, the exploit of the various Kage during those conflicts.

Sakura made sure to pay attention to everything that was being said, and surely enough, it managed to make her paranoia go away, even if only for an hour. The girl was actually surprised that Kurenai knew so many details that weren't covered in the shinobi history classes that she had at the academy, despite the actual topics being things she was very familiar with already.

Roughly an hour after the lecture started, Sakura's curiosity won over and she was just about to ask Kurenai about how she knew so much... when her fears started to truly become reality.

"My bugs detected four signatures of chakra on the side of the road, just twenty minutes ahead of the clones," Shino reported, making the entire group stop in their tracks immediately. "One of the signatures is from some sort of Water Release technique that is concentrated on the ground, and it is... somehow engulfing the signatures of three other humans."

 _'And so it begins...'_ Kakashi though, sharing a meaningful glance with Kurenai. " Excellent work, Shino. Naruto, make a shadow clone," the man said with the same firm tone that he used when giving orders to his subordinates when he was an ANBU captain, which was enough to make Naruto swallow the question that was forming on his mouth and simply do as he was told to.

"There are enemies ahead," Kakashi spoke to the clone. "Stay where you are and fake a conversation between yourselves. We will send more information about what you have to do later. Do _not_ try to engage."

The clone was a bit taken aback by Kakashi's words, but his confusion was short-lived as he was struck by Kakashi's fist almost immediately after he nodded, surprising Tazuna and the kids. "This will send the message to the decoys," the silver-haired man clarified.

"I believe that the enemy is using the Mizugakure no Jutsu to conceal themselves within a puddle of water," Kurenai shook her head. "How stupid of them. It hasn't rained in quite a while, so this disguise is pretty pathetic."

Kakashi nodded in agreement. "This means we are probably dealing with a squad of chunin, since a jonin wouldn't make this kind of amateurish mistake, and genin would never get an assassination mission like this..."

"Hey, hey, hey! Wait a sec, an assassination mission?!" Kiba's incredulous voice made everyone turn their eyes at him. "Aren't we going too fast here? I mean, why would ninja even be after this smelly old geezer?"

"Smelly?! Why, you little br—"

"We are assuming the worst-case scenario for now, Kiba. They might also be after us instead of Tazuna-san, but worry about the details later. Hopefully after we get past those ninja and they don't do anything to us." Kurenai knew that the chances were low, but they could always be in another kind of mission that didn't involve their own fake C-rank mission. "Regardless, if they do attack us, we will keep them alive for interrogation purposes, so the answers will come soon. Also, refrain from insulting our client."

The Inuzuka recoiled after being glared at and wisely kept his mouth shut afterwards. Much to his curiosity, Tazuna suddenly seemed even more nervous than usual rather than looking pleased to see him being scolded by Kurenai like Kiba thought he would have been.

"So, what's our plan, Kakashi-sensei?" Sasuke asked.

"Before we let the decoy bunshin approach them, we need to decide who will be engaging the enemies." Kakashi then turned to Kurenai. "We should be able to take them out with ease, but if they are chunin specialized in assassination, then they likely shouldn't be too hard to deal with without the element of surprise. What do you think about leaving the fight to our squads?"

Kurenai scowled. "There's no need to endanger the kids, Kakashi."

"Yeah, I agree," Tazuna nodded. "If you two can deal with it, then it's better to keep the kids safe."

"But if these ninja are indeed hostile, then it's likely to get worse from here on out. It will be good for them to get experience while we could still reliably save them if something goes wrong," Kakashi argued. "And they are not just kids, they are ninja. Sooner or later they will have to face this kind of situation, and from what I saw yesterday, I think we can trust them to deal with this."

Both Kurenai and Tazuna begrudgingly backed off, well aware that the situation was indeed not going to get much better as the mission continued. If the genin could get first-hand experience with dangerous situations before Gatou sent jonin-level ninja after them, that was to their advantage.

"In that case, I believe that we should split up in pairs," Shino suggested to the other genin. It seemed logical, considering their numeric advantage.

"I want Sakura as my partner," Sasuke stated immediately, much to everyone's surprise. "She is the only one that I can fight with without worrying about burning something important with my jutsu, and I will definitely need the literal firepower if we are fighting a chunin," he elaborated, approaching the girl afterwards once Kakashi accepted his logic.

There was no lie in Sasuke's words: Naruto, Kiba and Hinata focused on taijutsu, and his Great Fireball was a bad idea if they wanted Shino to remain useful. Sakura, on the other hand, didn't lose much by hanging back and supporting him by throwing kunai and using genjutsu. However, the true reasons for him to want Sakura by his side in the coming battle came from what she had shared with him earlier, before Naruto arrived. He had glanced at her a few times during the course of the trip and seen how the pink-haired girl was always scanning the area around them, despite having a Byakugan user in the group, and her hand had been resting suspiciously close to her kunai pouch the whole time. It was almost as if she was expecting something to happen.

People don't change drastically overnight, so he still thought that Sakura wasn't very useful as far as combat went. As such, the Uchiha concluded that he needed to be with her as he was the most capable of the other five genin and would be better able to deal with the enemy with poor backup... but there was also another part of him that knew that she would be in grave danger if she went to battle as nervous as she was, and that he'd have the best shot at protecting her from harm during a fight.

Just like before, he had no idea of how to deal with Sakura, but Sasuke hoped that by simply partnering up with her, she would feel safer, and perhaps it would encourage her to do her best in the coming fight. But, just in case his actions weren't enough, he had one more card to pull.

"I'm counting on you," he nodded firmly at the girl, drawing an unopened fuuma shuriken from his backpack as he did so.

It took Sakura a couple seconds to process what Sasuke was doing, but soon enough she returned the nod, her face's color almost matching her own hair's. "I-I-I won't let you down, Sasuke-kun," she promised, feeling a little silly for stuttering but also feeling happy for earning her crush's attention. She repressed said happiness, carefully hiding them behind a partial mask of determination. _'I need to focus! I can always do my happy dance later... Sasuke-kun is depending on me to help him!'_

Hinata watched the interaction with some amusement, wondering if she looked as cute as Sakura did when blushing and stuttering. The tables were soon turned on her, not only by her conclusion that she probably looked stupid at those times, but by what Shino suggested afterwards.

"In that case, I believe the best way to divide us, for now, would be me with Kiba, and Hinata with Naruto."

"...W-w-what?! M-me and... and...?!" Contrary to her usual reaction to situations involving the blond Uzumaki, Hinata's face only became paler than usual. Being forced to fight people that would be aiming to kill her was bad enough already, but risking pissing off her crush thanks to her uselessness was something she didn't want to add to her pile of worries at that moment.

"As long as I don't have to fight with the mutt again, I'm fine with anyone," Naruto grumbled, which immediately sparked a small argument between him and Kiba.

Hinata made use of the opportunity and approached her remaining teammate. "Shino-kun, d-don't you think it would be better f-for me to be with Kiba-kun? Y-you can't see through his smokescreen a-and—"

"Perhaps so, but I think that hiding yourself among Naruto's clones by using the Transformation Jutsu would provide you a better chance of striking the enemy than attacking from within a smokescreen while dodging Kiba's own attacks," the Aburame explained, knowing that Hinata had little problem with evading Naruto's attacks. "Besides, neither I nor Naruto have the capacity to end the fight as quickly as you and Kiba, so the teams would be better balanced with the groups I proposed. Don't you agree?"

Shino felt a little bad for using Hinata's fear of underperforming against her, but he knew that he and Naruto would be in danger if their enemy focused on speed—which was practically guaranteed if they were assassination specialists.

Sighing, Hinata begrudgingly resigned herself to her fate and dropped the subject, hesitantly moving towards Naruto. Both the blond and the Inuzuka were separated already, silently dealing with the pain from the aftermath of Kakashi's ear flicks while avoiding the disapproving glare Kurenai was sending their way.

After sharing Shino's plan with her new partner, Naruto broke into a grin. "Hey, I think that can work! Let's kick some ass!" the blond affirmed, smiling confidently. That's not to say Naruto wasn't feeling scared about the upcoming fight, but after Itachi, he figured that being scared at this point was rather silly. It did little to calm his beating heart, but at least it allowed him to keep his mask on more smoothly.

Soon, a small army of roughly two dozen Narutos appeared in the right half of the road, with some of them actually appearing in the grassy area on the roadside due to a lack of space. All of them were sporting the same excited expression that the original had before using the Kage Bunshin no Jutsu, with the single exception of one blond that was a bit further from the orange mob, fidgeting and looking at the ground.

"I, um... l-let's do our best!" Hinata said, her new blue eyes avoiding contact with one of the many pairs of similarly colored eyes that were currently looking at her. Not that she wasn't aware of what Naruto and his clones were doing; thanks to her Byakugan being already activated from underneath her chakra-based disguise, she saw their nods, smiles and thumbs-ups. Hinata, however, had already lost track of the original Naruto.

"Make one more clone for us, Naruto." Nodding in acknowledgment of Kurenai's order, one of the blonds then made the clone hand sign to add one more to their numbers.

"Alright," Kakashi approached the newest clone, "It's time for the decoy squad to move out, but make sure to act as if you don't know that you are about to be ambushed," he said before dispelling the clone with a fist that came faster than the chakra construct could even perceive. Turning to the one that he knew that was actually a blue-haired Hyuuga, he added another order: "Keep your eyes on the decoys, because we will also need you to report what is going on when they get ambushed." The girl nodded uneasily and focused on the fake Team 7.

 _'Hmm... I guess they are receiving the new memories,'_ Hinata mused, noting how the clones suddenly spaced out before continuing to walk.

"Let's keep moving so that we don't miss anything," Kurenai ordered, watching as Akamaru consumed a soldier pill. "And Naruto, make sure to concentrate—your report will also be key to figuring out how to deal with this situation."

Hinata's Byakugan eventually detected a bright blue gleam on a small part of the road just ahead of the clones, and soon after the decoy squad passed them, three figures emerged from what she imagined to be the puddle Kurenai previously mentioned.

Doing her best efforts to control her nervous stutter, Hinata proceeded to report to everyone what she had just seen. The enemies were all ninja from Kirigakure, dressed in brown military-style camouflage clothing and wearing black rebreather masks. One of them was completely bald and wore two gauntlets with long, kunai-length claws attached to the top of his hand.

The other two had brown hair long enough to reach their shoulders, with one having a wild and shaggy hairstyle that contrasted with the straight and seemingly combed hair of the second man, who also wore a grey poncho that was tattered around its edges. What was particularly notable about the pair was that each wore a single clawed gauntlet, connected to each other via a big, shuriken-styled chain. Their claws were significantly smaller than the one belonging to their bald companion, being only about 1,5 inches long, and were placed where their nails were supposed to be. None of the three had any kunai or shuriken with them, surprisingly enough.

Hinata refrained from describing their appearance and pretty much just told them about their weapons and the village they came from in the little time she had between the trio of Mist ninja getting out of the water puddle and their ambush starting.

The chained pair immediately made their move on the Kakashi clone, wrapping him with the chain and pulling it to "kill" him. The bald man with the long claws trusted his companions to deal with the jonin and quickly went after Tazuna instead of the genin. All three of the Mist chunin were caught off-guard by the small smoke clouds that formed after Kakashi and Tazuna were "killed", but the bald man regained his composure fast and quickly slew the clones of the three genin with a single, wide sweep of his right claw.

The three assassins, confused, started to talk to each other to try and make sense of what had happened to them. Likewise, Tazuna's escorts made use the opportunity to discuss their intel and how they would proceed from there.

"Wow... it's just as Hinata said," Naruto confirmed, awed by seeing the experience through the eye of his clones. "The only thing I would add is that the guy with the big claws is almost as fast as Kiba when he's all doggy. Not to say the other two aren't fast, but..." Naruto trailed off, with the disguised Hinata offering two tiny nods to reinforce his point to the others.

"...I'm afraid that Kiba might be the only one of us who is able to engage him, in that case. I believe that I, or anyone else, would just get in the way," Shino said, with some regret.

"Well... in that case, let's alter your plan a little. I was originally going to leave Tazuna with you guys—"

"You were what?!" Tazuna interrupted Kakashi.

"No harm would fall to you, Tazuna-san," Kurenai assured him. "If their speed is as Naruto says, then we should be able to stop them before anyone gets hurt."

Kakashi audibly cleaned his throat. "Continuing, I think those ninja might be suspicious if they don't see Tazuna among you. I'm somewhat infamous in the ninja world, so they will already think something is off if they don't see me... but between Hinata hiding as one of Naruto's clones and Shino posing as Tazuna, you all could reasonably pass for a squad of chunin that might be using my disguise just as an intimidation tactic and they won't find my absence to be strange."

The Aburame carefully considered the change of plans as the people that would indeed be fighting prepared themselves for it. Kakashi's logic was sound; however, there was no guarantee that the enemies would act as intended and that they wouldn't flee and try to ambush Tazuna later if they noted the jonin's absence.

He was a bit bothered by the idea of possibly not directly contributing to the fight, but a few of his bugs were already draining a small amount of chakra from the enemies and—most importantly—he managed to warn the entire group about the ambush before it could happen. That, he figured, was more than enough for his part. But the fact that he would leave Kiba to deal with the one who was seemingly the leader of the trio all by himself was also worrying him. Not that he thought Kiba was incompetent, but his enemy was likely more experienced than he was. But as much as he didn't want to abandon his teammate, the Aburame knew that he was the slowest of the six genin, being able to outspeed Naruto for only a minute or two before the blond's stamina gave him an edge—a fact that he had the pleasure to deal with during their spar on the day before.

Subconsciously, Shino's head turned towards his teammate, who happened to note that the Aburame was looking at him. "Hey, you could always send your bugs to help me after the smoke clears out if you are worried," Kiba suggested, standing beside a clone of his that was definitely Akamaru in a disguise.

"That's... acceptable, I suppose," the bespectacled boy concurred, knowing that his bugs had problems maneuvering within Kiba's smoke clouds. "But do not take unnecessary risks."

Kiba rolled his eyes. "Yes, mom. Trust me, he won't even see what hit him."

"Um... I t-think they want to fight us head-on, from what I can see of their gestures..." Naruto's voice rang out, but it's owner obviously wasn't the young Uzumaki.

"If that's the case, then I believe that you guys can handle the rest. If anything bad is about to happen. we will intervene," Kakashi assured, eye-smiling at them for a second before glaring at the six genin. "However, if the enemy does get to "Tazuna" or if we have to step in before you guys get hurt... let's just say that the training I'll put you through will make you wish that I had let them kill you instead."

With his empty threat hanging in the air, he grabbed Tazuna's arm and body flickered to a nearby tree branch before the old man could even know what was going on. Kurenai followed after him almost immediately afterwards, casting a small invisibility genjutsu over their hiding spot. It would wear off if they needed to move beyond a single meter away from where it had been casted, but considering that the fight would be over at the moment they chose to act, that wasn't much of a problem.

The remaining genin looked at each other uneasily for a few seconds.

"So... we just need to wait for those guys to come over here to have their asses kicked, right?" one of the Narutos asked, this one definitely not being the shy Hyuuga that was hiding somewhere within the orange-colored mob.

"No... we still need to find a way to separate them," Sakura disagreed. "It will be kinda pointless to split up in groups if the three fight together anyways."

"I have a plan for dealing with that. Don't worry." Sasuke said, looking at Sakura, who smiled appreciatively at him in return. The Uchiha nodded and went to talk with Kiba, leaving the pinkette to her thoughts.

While they briefly discussed their battle plans, Sakura noticed that Sasuke seemed aware that she had worried and nervous the whole day. He had been a bit awkward about it, but the pinkette could see that he was trying to get her to feel better, in his own way.

But while Sakura did feel happy that she was receiving her crush's attention, she also knew that Sasuke didn't trust her to perform well enough during the battle in her current state of mind. Despite she herself agreeing with that logic, it hurt to know that he considered her as a burden to her team.

And that's why she resolved to prove Sasuke wrong in the coming battle. Both for his sake... and for herself.

* * *

"Gouzu, Meizu, it's decided! We are going after them!"

"Yes, aniki!"

And with that declaration, the trio of shinobi known as the Demon Brothers took off, intent on making the Konoha ninja regret trying to fool them with a bunch of shadow clones.

The bald man, true to Naruto's observations, was faster than his younger twin brothers and had a lead of a few meters over the other two as they ran. It took only a little less than a minute for them to find their opponents... which were just a bunch of kids standing in front of an old man—their target.

Notably, one of the kids had a clone standing just beside him, while another was surrounded by roughly two dozens of clones. As the man wondered which one of the two had been behind the shadow clones from earlier, he felt himself passing over a small, thin obstacle a few inches above the ground.

 _'Ninja wire?'_

He then heard the familiar sound of kunai and shuriken being launched and realized what his distraction had cost him. Still, thanks to his good reflexes, he managed to jump back in time to avoid the flurry of kunai that struck the area where he was just about to run into, but it was not enough to avoid the explosion of the smoke bomb that was strapped to one of the kunai...

* * *

"Guys, I smell poison on them," Kiba warned, already under the effects of the Four-legs Technique. "Don't get hit!" And with that, both the Inuzuka and his partner bolted to engage the leader of the trio inside the smokescreen.

"Sasuke-san, two of them are trying to jump over the smoke," Hinata reported, making the real Naruto and most of his clones frown from hearing the sound of his voice addressing Sasuke with an honorific. It did not sound right _at all_.

"Hn. Just as planned..." Sasuke then opened his fuuma shuriken and prepared to toss it as if it were a throwing axe—with the blade positioned vertically. As soon as Gouzu and Meizu appeared, Sasuke calculated their trajectory, jumped, and threw his weapon.

The twins were momentarily startled by Sasuke's incoming attack, but they relaxed once they saw that the shuriken would miss them completely. As such, when they landed on the ground, neither of them were prepared to feel the yank of the chain that connected both of them together as the fuuma shuriken struck it.

The force of the massive shuriken connecting with the chain wasn't enough to break it in half, but it put stress on the more fragile links deep inside the brothers's gauntlets and knocked the pair out of their balance, making them fall ungracefully to the ground.

Both of the Mist chunin looked backwards on instinct, which allowed them to see that their chain was now stuck to the ground thanks to the shuriken. Immediately, the two brothers got up from the ground as they pressed a hidden button inside their gauntlets, freeing it from the chain and allowing them to move independently. Gouzu and Meizu recovered fast enough to avoid the various shuriken that Sakura launched at them, carefully aimed so that both would need to dodge sideways and be further separated from each other.

In Gouzu's case, "avoid" only meant he wasn't harmed by the projectiles, because one of them actually managed to cut through part of his poncho. Luckily for him, both of the kids responsible for attacking them from afar seemed to choose him as their opponent, giving him the opportunity to make them regret ruining his favorite clothing article.

Leaving his brother to deal with the orange army that was approaching, Gouzu ran at Sasuke and Sakura immediately. _'So the boy fights up close and the girl at a distance, eh?'_ Gouzu concluded, noticing how Sasuke rushed to meet him in combat while Sakura hung back. _'Let's see how they fight and who needs to be taken down first,'_ he thought, seeing the black-haired boy draw a single kunai from his weapons pouch

As he clashed with Gouzu, Sasuke displeasedly realized that despite being only a bit slower than Kiba as far as running went, the enemy ninja's strikes were both faster and stronger than the young Inuzuka's. That, coupled with how the man's steel gauntlets had thick metal rings that he used to fend off Sasuke's kunai attacks, made the Uchiha briefly consider that he might be in trouble if he didn't find an opening soon.

Much like in his fight against Hinata, counterstriking was not an option. Kiba hadn't been sure of where exactly these guys had poison, but Sasuke imagined that getting hit by the man's claws would bring more than just a scratch.

Despite all of this, the Uchiha wasn't in a complete disadvantage. Unlike Gouzu, his strikes were carefully calculated to be strong, but not too strong to leave him vulnerable after misses and parries. Gouzu's strikes didn't leave him open enough for Sasuke to truly get a good hit on him, but they were enough for him to keep up with the man for a few seconds.

In the midst of taking a step back to avoid a stab from Sasuke, Gouzu saw three copies of Sakura ready to shoot their kunai at him: two coming from each of the Uchiha's sides, while the last one chose to jump high to attack him from behind her teammate.

Gouzu converted his dodge into backwards leap just in time to witness the three dagger-like weapons intercepting each other, disrupting the illusion and revealing that only the kunai that was now to his right was real. _'So the girl on the left is the real one... heh.'_

Sakura had aimed so that her kunai would strike the man's chest, but she hadn't bothered to calculate where the kunai would've ended up if she had missed. That proved to be a mistake, because the blade ended up slightly buried in the ground only inches away from Gouzu's reach.

Not one to pass up such an opportunity, the man quickly grabbed the weapon and tossed it back at its owner. He didn't have time to react to the girl using a Substitution without even making a single hand sign, because Sasuke also capitalized on the opening to throw his own kunai at him.

"I got you!" Sasuke grinned. Knowing that the man would have no time to dodge the weapon, Sasuke ran at him, drawing another kunai as he approached his foe.

"Oh, is that so?" the man taunted, grabbing the kunai mid-flight inches away from his head; his gauntlet protecting from the cuts that would've normally resulted from such a move. Passing the blade to his other hand, he twirled the kunai to hold it in a reverse grip. It was not a very efficient for attacking—especially not with his non-dominant hand—but it was the best choice for what he had planned for the Uchiha.

Making use of the shock clearly evident on the boy's face, Gouzu rushed at him, wearing a wide predatory smirk that went completely unseen thanks to his rebreather mask. Just as he predicted, Sasuke reacted without thinking and tried to swing at him instead of dodging.

 _'Dammit!'_ With the clang of steel hitting steel and the fact that his strike was parried by what had once been his own kunai, Sasuke realized that he had been put in check, and the finishing move was just about to come as Gouzu prepared to slit the boy's throat with his claws...

That is, until Sakura chose that moment to introduce Gouzu's face to her foot with a flying kick. The man was knocked backwards and crashed to the floor a few meters away from where Sakura landed. A few leaves were stuck to the girl's long hair, evidence of where she had appeared after her substitution.

"Sasuke-kun, are you alright?!" she asked, eyes focused on her enemy as she got up from the ground. _'Ouch, that hurt...!'_ the girl thought, resisting the urge to rub her backside to alleviate the pain from the bad landing.

"Thanks to you. Now get out of the way," was all that Sasuke said as he started to run through a few hand signs, and Sakura did as she was told to, moving to the side of the Uchiha.

Gouzu, who was now sprawled at the floor, managed to recover from his dizziness and look up fast enough to see the boy taking a deep breath and subsequently releasing a stream of fire, aimed straight at him.

"Great Fireball Jutsu!"

Sasuke knew that they didn't need all three of the ninja alive, and while he wasn't very sure if he would cope well with his first kill, he decided to deal with that later. But unlike him, Sakura managed to see the Mist ninja making a single hand sign before his body started liquefying. Sasuke wasn't considering that his target would be just a puddle of water, so his projectile passed right above Gouzu's "body".

After two seconds, Gouzu realized that his gambit paid off and that he hadn't burst into flames, so he immediately emerged from the jutsu... only to find the ball of fire just inches away from his face.

"What the hell?!"

The shock had been enough to make him lose his balance and fall backwards... and then he noticed that the fireball was _floating_ in the air, completely frozen mid-flight.

 _'What... the hell?!'_

Had he been given a few more seconds he would've realized that he was hit by a genjutsu, but before he had the chance, Sakura dropkicked him from behind, the impact to his head being strong enough to knock him out before the floating fireball disappeared as his body crashed into it and, subsequently, the ground.

Thanks to her rather daring choice of attack, Sakura had also landed on the ground. Learning from her mistakes, she positioned herself so that her left leg would bear the brunt of her weight, saving herself from more pain. Sakura saw Sasuke approaching the man, holding a kunai and ready to take him down if he was still moving.

Once it became clear to the duo that he was unconscious, Sakura relaxed, sprawling herself right in the middle of the road. "I did it... we are alive...!" Sakura said in a barely audible tone, between deep breaths.

"Whoa there, Sakura-chan!" Naruto approached the girl and offered a hand to her. Removing her own from over her heart, which was still beating furiously, Sakura accepted the help and got up from the ground. "That was a pretty awesome move, but we were kinda meant to not kill them, you know?"

Despite the blond's playful tone and smirk, Sakura gasped and covered her mouth with her hand, completely missing his joke.

"Um... his heart is still beating," Hinata offered meekly, making Team 7's genin turn towards her and note that she had dropped her disguise. "B-b-but he won't be moving anytime soon," she concluded her diagnosis, averting her gaze when she caught Naruto looking right at her. Her lavender eyes fell to the fallen form of Meizu, who had been floored by Naruto and his clones after being paralyzed by her own Jyuuken strikes.

"Impressive showings," Shino complimented, also back to his true form. "With the exception of a few of Naruto's clones, you even managed to defeat them without taking damage."

"Heh, you know it! Team 7 rocks!" Naruto exclaimed, beaming at the Aburame and purposefully ignoring the boy's comments about his clones.

"Aren't you forgetting someone?" Sakura suggested, staring sharply at him.

Naruto looked at her in confusion for about three seconds, until Sakura subtly glanced at Hinata and then back at him. "Ah, I guess there was Hinata too! Great job!" The blond offered the bluenette a high-five, and while Sakura wanted to keep watching to see how the shy Hyuuga would react, Sasuke had other plans in mind.

"I... I believe I said this before," the Uchiha began, looking uncomfortable once Sakura turned to him, "but... thanks for helping me out there."

"O-oh... don't mention it. That's what teammates are for, right?" Sakura smiled bashfully at him, doing her best to remain firmly rooted to where she was instead of succumbing to the voice inside her head that suggested tackling him into a hug and declaring her undying love to him instead.

"I suppose..." he trailed off, not really knowing what else to say. He found himself unable to maintain eye contact with Sakura's emerald eyes and looked away, catching a glimpse of Shino trying to remove the kunai that had gotten stuck in the log his teammate had substituted herself with.

Sakura also had no idea of how to salvage their conversation, but in the midst of subconsciously playing her hair, a single leaf dislodged itself from her pink tresses, slowly falling to the ground as the pinkette watched it.

Knowing that Sasuke wasn't looking at her at that moment, she let a devious smile form on her lips before suppressing it completely seconds later. Doing her best to look somewhere between embarrassed and annoyed, she started to pass her hand through her hair again.

"Um, Sasuke-kun? I think I've got some leaves stuck in my hair... do you mind removing them for me?" Sakura asked innocently, keeping up her pleading stare as the Uchiha considered his answer. "Like, I can't see behind my back so..."

"...Fine." Sasuke had half a mind to deny her once he recognized what she was trying to do, but he had promised himself that he would make an effort to be more friendly to Naruto and Sakura and... well, saying "do it yourself" and walking away probably wasn't very friendly. He started to move towards the girl, when a voice rang out from somewhere ahead of him.

"Hey, can anyone help me out here? This guy is heavy!" In the midst of the dissipating smoke cloud, they could see Kiba dragging the limp figure of the bald ninja.

"Um... I'm coming!" Naruto answered, rushing to assist the Inuzuka and leaving a flustered Hinata behind him.

"Ah, one of those rare moments where Kiba has a good idea..." Shino said, approaching the other members of team 7 and giving a kunai to Sasuke. "Do you mind helping me to bring the man you defeated near that tree so that we can tie him down for our sensei to interrogate them?"

Sasuke looked back at Sakura, who shot a strained smile at him. "D-don't mind me... go help Shino, hehe..." The Uchiha merely nodded and made his way towards Gouzu.

If the Aburame had the ability to read minds or sense negative emotions, perhaps he wouldn't have dared to give Sakura's kunai back to her at that moment. Turning around to follow Sasuke, the bug-user completely missed the scornful glare Sakura sent his way. The girl then remembered who the true guilty party was and shifted her smoldering gaze to Kiba, who was now obliviously instructing Naruto on how to help him carry the Mist chunin he had defeated inside the smoke cloud.

 _'Dammit, I was so close!'_ Sakura thought, doing her best to keep her outburst purely internal. A frustrated sigh coming from somewhere to her right caught her attention. Looking at the source of that sound, she saw a depressed-looking Hinata.

The girl's shoulders were slumped and she was shaking her head slightly. _'Way to go, Hinata. If he didn't think I was a weirdo before, he surely thinks it now. And to think I was doing so well yesterday, too...'_

"You alright there, Hinata...?" Sakura asked tentatively, walking towards the girl and prompting the Hyuuga to look at her.

"I... I tried to t-talk to him, b-but... I started stuttering n-nonsense and then I just... froze," Hinata admitted, shame building up until she couldn't maintain eye contact any longer.

"Hey," the pinkette placed her hands on Hinata's shoulder, "don't worry too much about it, alright? We will be together for more than a week, so you can always try again later. No need to rush anything," Sakura said, hoping to comfort not only Hinata, but herself as well.

"Thank you, Sakura-san." Hinata gave out a soft smile that Sakura returned with one of her own.

"Now come on, we can talk more about that later. We can't let the boys do all the work now, can we?" the pinkette asked, motioning at the knocked out Meizu.

Meanwhile, as the girls were chatting, Naruto and Kiba were also engaged in a conversation as they dragged the leader of the Demon Brothers.

"Seriously? He thought that Akamaru was a shadow clone of you?" Naruto asked as he grabbed the ankles of the unconscious Mist chunin to assist Kiba, who had been dragging the man by the legs until then. The Inuzuka was now walking backwards, holding the man by his shoulders as Naruto helped him with extra arms and a pair of eyes.

"Yeah, I guess he got confused when he heard Akamaru's transformation wearing out after he landed a kick on him." Kiba answered, glancing at his partner who was resting comfortably atop his head. _'Guess the pup is not hurt. Thank goodness...'_

"And... how did you even break his claws?" The blond turned his head to look at the shattered remains of the weapon that had killed most of his decoy clones. "Careful with the chain, by the way," he pointed at the ground with his chin once he looked back at the road in front of him.

Kiba nodded. "Relax, I can smell the stink of poison on it. Anyways, I broke his claws—and his hands—because he thought that he'd be able to counter my Tsuuga by using that puddle jutsu while leaving his claws out to hit me as I passed through. The guy then started to spout some nonsense about how he got his claws from his father and such." Kiba snorted, rolling his eyes. "As if I cared about his backstory. And how was your fight? Is Hinata alright?"

"I dunno, she looked fine, but she left me hanging after the fight," Naruto frowned. He wasn't keen on respecting others, but refusing a high-five was beyond rude. "I asked her why, but I didn't understand a word of what she said. And then she just stopped talking entirely."

"Heh... don't worry, Hinata can be weird like that sometimes," Kiba assured him with a playful smirk.

"If you say so..." Naruto shrugged, hoping that the Hyuuga wouldn't confuse him the next time they interacted. "Anyways, she just hung back and attacked him two or three times while he was busy with my clones. I don't think he even noticed what happened, since he was taking it easy before I knocked him out." The man had been much faster than Naruto, but when he saw how slow the boy and his clones were, he started to attack in flashy ways, clearly enjoying himself because of how easy the fight was... until his arms suddenly stopped working, which allowed the clones a chance to gang up on him.

"It was kinda boring, actually," Naruto shrugged nonchalantly. In truth, he was quite upset about being completely outclassed by Meizu during their fight, despite being indeed happy that he came out victorious. It didn't help that, from what he could see, nobody else really struggled with their respective opponents. After all, his own teammates and Kiba had no wounds to speak of, but some of his clones were casualties during the fight.

"You shouldn't be worried about getting entertainment out of this, you idiot!" Sakura scolded Naruto, glaring angrily at him as she and Hinata dropped Meizu for Sasuke and Shino to deal with. "I'd rather be safe and sound after an easy fight than almost dead after winning against a tough opponent."

"Sakura is right," Kurenai agreed, approaching the genin from the forest with Kakashi and Tazuna walking in tow. "You are all alive and that's what's more important."

"Didn't think you brats had it in you, but I guess I was proven wrong, eh?" the bridge builder commented, looking at Naruto as he and Kiba also dropped their own cargo for the other male genin to tie up using their own poisoned chain.

"Well, I can see room for improvement, but overall you all did a great job," Kakashi praised them, eye-smiling at the kids for a few seconds before his expression turned serious again. "But now... we need to have a talk about this mission... don't we, Tazuna-san?"

"...What are you talking about?" the older man asked warily, playing dumb despite knowing that it was futile to do so. He already had a suspicion that the old Hokage knew about it, since giving him two teams for the price of one made little sense for a seemingly simple mission like the one he had paid for (of course, Tazuna wasn't aware of how Sarutobi was using his educational experiment to justify that choice), and now it looked like the other two knew what he was hiding, too.

"He is talking about how those three handled the decoy squad," Kurenai answered, crouched near the tree with the captured ninja from the Mist. The woman checked their bindings and, concluding that Sasuke and Shino had tied them up correctly, casted a quick genjutsu to keep them unconscious if they woke up and, finally, got up to stare at Tazuna. "If you'd remember Hinata's report, she said that two of them went after the Kakashi clone first. This is natural regardless of their objective, since he'd be the bigger threat to them. However, the third man went after your clone instead of the genin's."

"In other words, these three weren't here to kill Leaf shinobi—you were their target from the beginning. And protecting you against ninja attacks isn't part of our mission." Kakashi stated. Of course, he and Kurenai both already knew the truth behind the ambush and Tazuna's lie long ago, but they couldn't allow the genin to find out about that detail, for obvious reasons.

"Indeed. Hokage-sama told us that the only dangers in this mission would be bandits, and that wasn't even a certainty," Shino stated. "But if those men were hired to kill you, then surely, someone must have a good reason to want you dead."

"You can either tell us right now or wait for me to interrogate them," Kakashi suggested, and admitting defeat, Tazuna sighed and started to share his story.

"...You are right, these men were indeed trying to kill me. And it's all because of the bridge that I'm trying to build, which is also why I requested for you to keep protecting me until I'm done building it."

"Wait, what?!" Sakura interrupted him. "So you knew they would send ninja to kill you? To kill us?!"

"As revolting as it is," Shino spoke up in a flat tone that contrasted with his words, "a more important question would be: why would anyone want your head merely because of a bridge?"

"It's not just a mere bridge anymore," the old man frowned. "Have any of you brats heard of a man named Gatou?"

"Y-y-you mean... Gatou Company's president?" Tazuna nodded at Hinata, who became even more pale than usual. Thanks to her position in her clan, she knew a thing or three about important figures of the world outside of the Land of Fire. As such, Hinata was aware that Gatou was one of the richest men in the world, and could definitely hire much more than just three random chunin if he truly wished.

Shino also knew of the man, since he too was a clan heir. Noticing the confused looks on the faces of the remaining genin, he decided to be helpful and explain the situation for them. "Gatou is a highly-successful businessman who deals with the production, importation and exportation of various goods, from iron ore to food to clothes. There are even rumors that he also deals with drugs and illegally sells weapons, but..."

"Those rumors are all true, I've seen it myself," Tazuna confirmed. "That man arrived in our country two years ago and bought every single port in the island. Because of that, he is the only one selling things to us, and the only one that can buy our own products."

"That... that means he has full control of your country's economy..." Sasuke muttered, finding the notion hard to believe.

"Why doesn't your Daimyo do anything!? I mean... it's his country, right?" Naruto asked, clearly upset. "What kind of leader abandons his country like that?!"

The bridge builder only shook his head forlornly. "The kind of leader that puts his family in first place. Daimyo's daughter has a rare illness and requires many kinds of medicine to survive... and Gatou is the only one capable of selling them to him right now. The Daimyo is supposed to serve the country, but... I don't blame him. If it was my daughter or my grandson, I'd have done the same," Tazuna admitted.

"And... since the Daimyo can't do anything to stop him, Gatou uses your country to work with his illegal stuff, right?" Sakura asked, eyes narrowed. _'What a scumbag!'_

"Yeah, that's exactly what he does. His fortune grows by the day, while we on the Land of Waves just get poorer and poorer." Tazuna shook his head in disgust, and then looked at everyone. "Do you see now why the bridge I am building is so important? Our whole country depends on me being alive to finish that project so that we can stop being Gatou's hostages! But... no one, not even the Daimyo, has enough money to pay for an A-rank mission. C-rank is all that our country could afford."

Much to everyone's surprise, Tazuna bowed to them. "I am sorry for putting you all in danger like that, but I hope you understand just why I did it."

"Look, Tazuna-san," Kiba began, uneasily. "I... I get your situation, but we are only genin. I mean, I just took down a chunin on my own but that's because he did some stupid shit. If this Gatou guy is that loaded... well, he can definitely pay for a jonin, and there's no way we will be taking down a jonin."

"Guys, Kiba is right," Sakura said. "This mission just got way too dangerous for us; we need to turn back!"

Kurenai and Kakashi shared a glance. They knew that, considering all that the Hokage had said to them two days ago, turning back wouldn't be an option... still, they silently agreed to let things play out and see how their genin would react to this.

"Turning back is indeed the most logical choice... but is it the right one?" Shino questioned. "Tazuna-san has no money for a higher-ranked mission after all."

"Also," Sasuke added, "while we wouldn't last against a jonin, we could focus on protecting our client and leave the jonin to jonin," he concluded, looking at Kurenai and Kakashi.

"Well, I dunno..." Kuba muttered, scratching the back of his head uneasily.

Seeing that Kiba and Sakura looked unconvinced, Naruto decided to share his opinion. "Argh, come on, guys! You heard what that Gatou guy is doing, didn't you? Are you really okay with abandoning those people and leaving them to deal with that bastard by themselves?! This... this isn't right!" he added, remembering Shino's earlier question. "Even if we can't do much, we should at least try to do something for them, because nobody else will! Are you two truly going to give up?!"

Hearing those words and in particular the last two sentences, Hinata couldn't help but smile at the blond, making use of the fact that he had his back turned to her. _'Naruto-kun is right, I can't give up here! Those people can't do anything to improve their situation so even if I can only do a little... I must try to help them!'_

"Eh... when you put it that way, I'd feel like an ass if I just left like that." Kiba said, scratching the back of his head sheepishly.

Naruto then engaged in a brief staring contest with Sakura, who faltered after a good ten seconds of intense visual combat. "Ugh, fine! I... I suppose if we don't actually involve ourselves in fights then it should be okay... " Sakura mumbled, looking away. She still thought it was a bad idea, but she knew she would have felt guilty about leaving the citizens of the Land of Waves to save her own hide.

"Awesome!" Naruto smiled brightly, and then remembered that someone had yet to say anything.

 _'Naruto-kun truly will be a great Hokage one day—'_

Said blond chose that moment to turn around and face Hinata. "What about you?"

The girl's eyes widened immediately and her smile disappeared.

"M-me? I... I-I can't g-gi—um, I mean, yes! I'll go! " she blurted out nervously, defensively waving her hands in front of herself, much to the blond's bemusement

"I guess that's we have no other choice then," Kurenai sighed, drawing Naruto's attention towards her much to Hinata's relief. The Hyuuga then pouted at Kiba, who was snickering at her from behind Naruto. Thanks to her blush, it had the complete opposite effect on the Inuzuka, though he stopped when Sakura discreetly elbowed him.

"Considering their performance so far, I think they can handle Tazuna while we deal with enemies," Kakashi said. Maybe he would've been more reluctant if he wasn't aware of the true dangers of this mission from the get-go, but that wasn't the case here. Looking over at the genin, he gave them an eye-smile. "You all did a great job, especially you two." he pointed at Sakura and Sasuke, who responded with a wide smile and a smirk respectively.

"And.. what about me...? And Hinata?" Naruto asked, frowning. The girl might be confusing, but it wasn't right to not credit her for the battle like he almost did.

"There were a few problems with how you worked with her, because you just attacked the opponent without actually trying to create openings for Hinata to exploit," Kurenai answered truthfully, before smiling at the blond. "But considering that you had no way to discern Hinata from your own clones, I'd say you did a great job at being her support."

That last word made Naruto remember what the Genjutsu Mistress had told Sakura yesterday about how supporting one's teammates could be more important than being the only doing the heavy lifting... which in turn, made his frown turn upside-down. "Heh... it doesn't matter if I'm supporting or if I'm attacking, I'm always awesome! Believe it!"

"I suppose you two don't have anything to say about my fight, right? Considering the smokescreen and all," Kiba said, mostly in an attempt to stop Naruto before he started to gloat too much.

"Well, normally you'd be right, but I have my ways..." Kakashi answered cryptically, much to Kiba's surprise. "Let's save the more detailed reviews of the fights for later, though. Right now, me and Kurenai need to interrogate those three to see if we can't learn anything useful."

Sadly for the Konoha ninja, the Demon Brothers didn't have any useful intel to share with the group. Seeing that, Kakashi summoned a dog with the Summoning Jutsu and asked it to deliver a message to the Hokage about the three Mist chunin so that the ANBU could apprehend them. He could've sent a message directly to the ANBU headquarters, but he didn't want to risk any ninja with an allegiance to Danzo _—_ who was a member of Konoha's council _—_ finding out about their mission. Despite ROOT being disbanded, Kakashi doubted that all of its members stopped working for the old war hawk.

"Not that I want you to do that or anything, but why not kill them?" Kiba asked, noting with interest that Kakashi had summoned a greyhound, which was the fastest dog breed that he knew of.

"Because they are missing-nin. I recognize them from my Bingo Book: they are known as the Demon Brothers. If they were from Konoha, depending on who they were, I might have just killed them," Kakashi admitted in a bored tone, making the genin and Tazuna feel unsettled. "But since they are from another nation, it's up to the Hokage to decide what to do with them."

The group departed not too soon afterwards, only not doing so immediately because they agreed on setting up another decoy squad as well sending Shino's bugs to scout ahead of them again. Gatou, to whom the Demon Brother admitted to work with after being interrogated, would likely need at least one day to realize that his assassins were defeated and would not be reporting back. Despite that, the group decided to not take any risks for now.

And so they continued to walk towards the Land of Waves. After two more hours of walking, the group briefly stopped to get some ration bars from the backpacks. Though Naruto protested, wanting to have a "real lunch, instead of this shitty-tasting bar"... the jonin, though, insisted that it would be better to eat something small, portable and energetic during lunch and promised the boy that dinner would be more elaborate than that.

Thanks to that, the blond had been obliged to eat his not-as-good-as-ramen ration bar, all while watching enviously as Tazuna enjoyed a delicious sandwich. But eventually, the day started to end and the group decided to find a good spot inside the nearby forest for them to set up camp and rest for the night...

* * *

A/N:

Well... we are done here, I suppose. I wanted to put two more events in this chapter before ending the day, but I decided to stick with my original plans and save them for the next chapter (as the Zabuza fight will take CONSIDERABLY less time in my story when compared to the original tale). In case anyone still remembers that, one of the events will deal with the Hinata vs Hanabi thingy I touched upon in chapters 2 and 3. Trying to explain that here backfired on me.

I hope people aren't too mad at me for leaving Naruhina to the sidelines during this chapter, but trust me: Sakura and Sasuke won't have a lot of screen time without Naruto acting as a third wheel in the future, so I need to make use of this arc while it's still here. Naruhina will become more frequent in a direct manner as this arc progresses, so don't worry too much about that.

I didn't write the Naruhina fight, nor the Kiba fight, because... in my honest opinion, I didn't feel like they were necessary or interesting to read (let alone write), given the strategies employed by the genin during those fights. What I needed to accomplish from them didn't need the entire thing written down, unlike the Sasusaku fight (which will get more exploration next chapter).

And about my first OC, the "bald man"... I left him unnamed because I did not find a good name to match Gouzu and Meizu's etymologically speaking. And, as an individual, he was not important enough to be named, too. I mean, if I need to, I'll just refer to all of them at once as "the Demon Brothers" or something. Sorry for that.

But I hope you all liked today's fight scene. I tried to do something a little more fast-paced and, uh, emotionally detached than the previous fights.

Also, can I ask a personal favor out of you, my readers? Between December 10th and 18th, this site completely STOPPED to track views and visitors to my fic. I am the only one that can actually see the fic's view count, but I'd like for it to be as accurate as possible, so do you guys mind visiting any chapters you might have read during that time period? I'd really like that!

I mean, there's a _huge_ drop of views between chapter 4 and 5, and chapter 6 actually has more views than 5 because it got posted later that week... it feels really awkward. Also, that week likely had the highest influx of views so far, since I updated twice in a short time-period, so I really wanted to have a decent grasp on how many people have tried to read my works and how many kept reading til the end so far.

This matters a lot to me, so please... even if you read all 6 of the chapters, it would take less than a minute as long as your internet isn't too slow, so... consider brightening my day a little? Thanks!

In other news, there will be a Boruto manga coming out this year. I hope it gives me good ideas for Part 4 stuff! Or perhaps stuff from previous parts, too... hmm. Hinata likely will stay as a side-character, so my hopes aren't very high. It will be probably be just as useless to me as Naruto Gaiden was.

Anyways, that's all I had for you guys!

Not to be arrogant/cocky/I dunno, but I'm pretty sure I'll hit 50 reviews/100 favorites with this upload so... really, thanks for that! See ya, and remember what I asked of you...

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.0.1 (11/16/2015)

Fixed one awkward sentence. Thank _gio08_ for warning me of it. _Sashu_ , _nightwind83_ and a guest have also contributed!

1.0.1 to 2.0 (07/16/2016)

Fixed typos, grammar, added some small details here and there... nothing too special. But I'd like to add that I'm sad most readers didn't bother helping me out, given that Chapter 4 and 5 have lower view counts than the following chapters...


	8. Chapter 8 - Of Rabbits and Demons

Hey everyone!

So, uh, forgive me for the one-week delay. But I have a good reason: I got a job basically on the day after I posted chapter 7, and that cut down my free time SIGNIFICANTLY. Of course, that's not considering how I will be going back to college soon... but I think I'll still manage to juggle those two things and this fic.

But I might need to delay the update at four or six points in the coming year, as I will need to study for my tests (which doesn't impact the writing much, but certainly screws with the revision time). Alternatively, this might also result in lower word counts for future chapters (around 10k like Chapters 1 and 3, instead of roughly 14K like the others).

Though not this one. This chapter has over 17000 words, so yeah. I could've ended it at 14/15k, but I'd rather not leave you guys without any Zabuza (yeah, that's the very last part of this thing... sorry). This should compensate for the delay since 14K words per month essentially means 3500 words per week...

And talking about word count... I went through my original draft of this chapter, and it was not only godawful: it was also almost completely useless. I salvaged some of the basic plotlines, but yeah. Since those first drafts have become more and more useless to me, I've changed a small part of my profile so now you all will be able to see the word count of the next chapter as I work on it. I will try to update that as much as possible, but I won't always be writing while having a (reliable) connection to the internet, so yeah.

Lastly, I did my best to research a few things about the setting of the first scenes, but please forgive me if I messed up somewhere...

Anyways, that is all I had to say for now. Enjoy the chapter! (Hopefully)

* * *

 _Land of Waves arc_

Chapter 8 – Of Rabbits and Demons (Current Version: 2.0)

* * *

 _'This is pointless...'_

A frustrated sigh escaped Hinata's lips as she changed positions inside her sleeping bag, accompanied by a frown that allowed even less light to pass through her already closed eyelids. It was not like her sleeping bag was uncomfortable, it was actually quite cozy... but she simply wasn't feeling sleepy. That was only natural, though—the moon wasn't reigning over the sky just yet, and her body wasn't tired enough to stop working on its own.

Her eyes, however, came dangerously close to that point during their journey. Hinata didn't want to comment on how moderate amounts of sunlight eventually became almost blinding or how activating her Byakugan brought her pain... but Kurenai noticed the signs of her struggles and decided to set up camp a good hour earlier than originally planned. Hinata tried to persuade the jonin that she was still able to keep going, but Naruto's clones chose that moment to dispel from a lack of chakra and that convinced Kurenai and Kakashi that they had traveled enough for the day.

Upon finding a good clearing for them to make use of during the night, the group had split up in order to prepare everything they would need for their stay.

Kakashi had decided to introduce the art of hunting to his genin and was currently overseeing Sakura and Naruto's attempts at getting dinner for the group in another part of the forest. Sasuke had volunteered to be the cook of the team and was relieved from such duties. Instead, the Uchiha ended up assisting Kiba and Shino as they went to gather the materials to make a fire, not only to bring light and warmth to everyone during the night, but also to give them the means to cook whatever Kakashi and his genin end up bringing back.

Kurenai's job was to protect Tazuna while everyone was gone. She proceeded to cast a powerful genjutsu around the clearing, making the whole area invisible, as well as making any smells or noises coming from inside being almost undetectable by anyone on the outside, save for people that had been inside the genjutsu's range as it was casted. The illusion was taxing, but it would last for many hours and was a sufficiently strong defense against any assassins that might be sent their way.

The Genjutsu Mistress had another task, one not at all related to her specialty: building the three tents the group would use for the night. The first tent was for Tazuna, and it would also be occupied by Kakashi and Shino. The other three boys would be sleeping in a second tent by themselves while Kurenai would sleep in a third tent alongside Sakura and Hinata. This would effectively split Team 8's genin over the three tents and allow the whole group to better detect and react to threats in the middle of the night, as well as maintaining the best balance of power between the three groups.

Hinata had been given the same primary job as Sasuke: cooking. She, however, did not get any specific tasks while waiting for the other groups to return, and was practically forced by Kurenai to rest in her tent to not strain her eyes any further. Hinata did not go without protesting against it, insisting that she was well enough to help as everyone prepared their camp... but it was only when Kakashi remarked that she wouldn't have to rest if she had told someone about her eyes sooner that she fell silent and accepted her "punishment".

The girl knew that it was ultimately for the better. After all, her Byakugan would be important during their mission, and she knew that cooking near a strong source of light would be downright impossible with her eyes as sensible as they were.

What was truly bothering her was that she felt useless and unreliable. Hinata still remembered when Naruto congratulated her after they worked together to defeat Meizu, and even though she reacted poorly when her crush offered her a high-five, the thought still brought a smile to her face. Kurenai and Kakashi had also given her a few compliments while they were walking, which was a nice bonus for her.

It was enough to keep the girl from focusing too much on her failures... such as how she was holding everyone back by forcing them to stop for the night early, or how she increased the workload for everyone thanks to not being deemed fit to help out during the early process of setting up camp. Not that knowing those things didn't make her feel bad, but she knew that there was a chance of ending her day on a high note.

She was in charge of cooking after all.

 _'I don't know what Naruto-kun and Sakura-san will bring back, but I shouldn't have many problems with whatever they find,'_ the girl mused. _'The real problem is going to be Sasuke-san...'_

Hinata was rather nervous about how her work with the Uchiha would turn out. She had no idea of how skilled he was with cooking and how cooperative he would be... but what truly concerned the bluenette was that she had a mission to accomplish tonight:

 _"Look, I'll try to see if I can't do anything to help you while I'm out with Naruto, but try to get something for me when you begin working with Sasuke-kun, ok?"_

Those were the words Sakura had whispered to her before winking and leaving to hunt dinner with the blond Uzumaki and their sensei.

 _'I guess I could try to talk about cooking with him. I mean... I don't really know anything substantial about Sasuke-san, but since he wanted to cook tonight, I... guess he might at least like doing that?'_ It sounded like a reasonable theory to Hinata, but she couldn't go out there with only a single plan of attack. _'If I don't grab his interest fast enough, he might just ignore me...'_

Being honest with herself, Hinata would actually like that. Talking to other people sometimes distracted her from the food... and if there was one thing that managed to make Hinata absolutely _furious_ , it was messing up in the kitchen. She could not afford to let Naruto (or anyone, really) seeing her flying off the handle like that, but most of all, she needed to help Sakura. Hinata knew that her mild success in interacting with Naruto on the previous day was, in part, thanks to Sakura encouraging her to take a step forward. _'I must find a way to return the favor...'_

Ultimately, Hinata couldn't choose which was the bigger waste of her time: trying to nap, or trying to find other topics for possible conversations with Sasuke beyond cooking. In the end, both activities only had served to make her even more frustrated and impatient as the minutes passed.

 _'I hate having nothing to do like this...'_

"Hinata, are you asleep in there?" As if he had heard Hinata's silent pleas for someone to rescue her from the boredom, Kiba's voice came from outside of her tent. His volume considerably lower than normal, just in case the girl wasn't awake just yet.

"Y-yes! B-b-but don't come inside!" Hinata blurted out, hurriedly getting out of her sleeping bag.

"Uh, okay...?" Hinata imagined Kiba shrugging at that point. "Anyways, the fire has been going on for a while, and Kakashi-sensei should be coming back soon, so Kurenai-sensei wanted me to wake you up."

"J-just give me a moment!" The Hyuuga replied, searching for the coat that she had discarded in an attempt to make herself more comfortable in the privacy of her tent. After finding her tan coat and putting it on, the girl quickly smoothed out her crumpled pants and messy hair. Once she was done making herself presentable, Hinata made her way to the tent's flap door. Grabbing the zipper slider that was close to the tent's ceiling, she opened it just slightly, allowing her to peek at the outside without being seen by anyone else.

The first thing that she noticed was a good twenty feet or so in front of her tent: a red tent similar to the one she had been using. What truly drew her attention, though, was a bright light coming from her right. Turning towards it, she saw the campfire that the boys (sans Naruto) had built, complete with two big, forked sticks to its side, meant to act as a support for a skewer.

A small distance away from the campfire, further to the right of where she was. Hinata could see the figure of Sasuke Uchiha. Normally, the bluenette would use the opportunity to wonder if she would truly be able to get anything out of the stoic boy... but this time, she was just completely confused.

Sasuke was sitting on a small brown stool, his back turned to a rather large table of the same color, facing the campfire. On its top, Hinata saw some cooking utensils which she recognized as part of the tools sealed in the basic cooking scroll Kurenai gave to her soon after Team 8 was formed. Sasuke had one of his own, since he was Team 7's designated cook, but he had also asked for Hinata's before she went to her tent.

Alongside them, the girl also saw the third wooden stick that they would need to skewer the meat, as well as two significantly smaller sticks that would go through the meat and the skewer to help hold the meat in place whenever it was turned. The Uchiha was currently in the process of peeling the dirty bark from those branches with a knife, which was a necessity since these wooden skewers would come in direct contact with the meat.

Most of what she saw made sense. But there was something wrong with that scene...

"From where did that table and those stools come from...?!" Hinata was absolutely certain that those things weren't included insides the storage scroll... and neither were the packages of salt and rice that the girl could spot behind one of the iron pots that were on the table.

"Kurenai-sensei made those!" Kiba answered, having heard the question despite the girl's low tone of voice.

Hinata's attention was immediately drawn to the leftmost side of the camp, where the rest of her team was. Kurenai, Shino, and Kiba were sitting on a wide brown bench that was situated between the red tent in front of her, and a yellow tent further to the left. Though she couldn't see it at the time, there was also another bench between her tent and the yellow one.

Having been found out already, the girl fully opened the zipper of the tent flap and got out of her temporary home. Walking towards her team, the girl noticed the big yellow tent and another brown bench. The trio of tents and the two benches roughly formed a C-like shape if viewed from above, with the campfire being to the outside of the "C".

 _'I guess that is Tazuna-san's tent?'_ Hinata thought she heard a snore-like sound coming from inside that tent, but she wasn't sure if that had been her imagination or perhpas just some noise from the nearby forest.

"Kiba, not so loud! Our client is sleeping!" Kurenai scolded the Inuzuka while pointing to the yellow tent, confirming Hinata's thoughts. The jonin's scowl gave way to a smile as her favorite student approached. "I made those things with a small earth jutsu and some earth chakra manipulation," the Genjutsu Mistress explained.

"They are not that comfortable, but it's better than nothing," Kiba shrugged.

"I see... um, well, is everything alright?"

"My bugs haven't detected anything," Shino stated. "Neither the ones surrounding the camp nor the ones I sent to follow Kakashi-sensei and the others."

"We should be fine for tonight, Hinata, don't worry," Kurenai assured her with a smile. "Those assassins were likely to report to Gatou only in the evening, considering how far the Land of Waves is from where they fought you. Sending another person after us would be risky, because Gatou likely isn't aware of when exactly we would be arriving there."

"So if there is another fight, it should be in the Land of Waves, right?" Kiba asked, his voice losing the casual tone it usually had.

"That's correct," Kurenai confirmed. "We won't drop our guard, but staying here for tonight should be safe."

"I... I see." Hinata answered, looking warily into the surrounding woods. _'This mission "should" have been safe, too but... I just hope Naruto-kun and Sakura-san don't take too long.'_

The sun had almost gone down but it still brought light into the camp, so the environment wasn't as scary as it would be in a couple hours. Still, Hinata didn't exactly feel safe—especially since she was told to not activate her Byakugan in order to not strain her vision and risk temporary blindness. Her previous train of thought, however, made her remember the one member of Team 7 that was actually present in the camp.

"Uh, I... I will c-check if Sasuke-san doesn't need any help." Hinata announced uncertainly, before turning and making her way to the opposite side of the camp.

"Good luck!" Kiba called out to her (this time keeping his loudness in check), which only made the girl more nervous.

As Hinata hesitantly walked towards him, Sasuke watched her with his peripheral vision, making a conscious effort to not look at the girl and possibly scare her away. He wasn't very experienced in dealing with people, but it didn't take a genius to know that the shy Hyuuga didn't deal very well with being in the spotlight, which led the raven-haired boy to stay concentrated on his work the whole time.

 _'Come on, Hinata! You can do this! Sakura-san is counting on you!'_ Determined to not fail her friend, Hinata stopped close to the Uchiha. "Hello, Sasuke-san," she said, offering a small smile and trying to stand as straight as possible.

"What do you want?" the boy said, stopping his work to look at Hinata. Though he intended to sound somewhere between neutral and casual, the way the girl practically recoiled at his words told him he had failed somewhere.

"I... I-I'm sorry to b-bother you but... but I was, um... d-d-do you need any help?" Hinata inquired, her volume dropping considerably as she felt almost all of the courage she had gathered slipping away from her. Her nervous habit of playing with her fingers resurfaced as she broke eye contact with the Uchiha heir.

"The only thing we can do right now is to wait. We need Kakashi to return so that he can give us the water to rinse and cook the rice." The boy then pointed to one of two iron pots that were on the table before going back to peeling the branch. "He left some water in there for us to use if the fire somehow goes out of control, but not any more than that."

"W-well... there's no point in getting the rice ready before the meat, right?" Hinata then focused on the packages of rice and salt that were on the table. "If... If you don't me asking, f-from where did those come from?"

"Tazuna brought quite a bit of non-perishable food with him and let us borrow some," Sasuke explained. "He said that just meat would be boring, and that he didn't want to risk us messing up dinner and leaving him without food, so he asked for us to make some rice. The salt is all that we have to use as seasoning, but I asked Kakashi to see if he can't find some wild onions or other herbs."

 _'Hmm, that makes sense. Unlike the meat, rice is ridiculously easy to make, even on a campfire,'_ Hinata thought, eyeing the thick wire that was close to the pots, which would be used to hang them over the coals.

"You sound confident," Sasuke noted, startling the girl. "I'm surprised that the heiress of a clan as traditional as the Hyuuga would have any idea of how to deal with campfire cooking. Or any sort of cooking at all. Don't you have servants to deal with that?" the boy asked, remembering what the academy had taught about the division of the Hyuuga clan into the branch and main families.

Said Hyuuga was also surprised, but at the fact that she had accidentally voiced her thoughts. "Oh, um... y-you are not... exactly wrong, but... I-I wandered into the kitchen, sometimes," Hinata blushed at the many memories she had of herself sneaking into the kitchen in pursuit of some cinnamon rolls and other sweets. "Seeing the cooks working on making dinner or lunch piqued my interest, so I eventually tried it out myself."

"I see," Sasuke said, inspecting the bigger skewer that he was working on before carefully placing it on the desk and removing the two smaller wooden branches from the stool that was beside him and placing them on his lap. This was because he still had to remove the bark from them, but it also happened to free a spot for Hinata to sit beside him. "So you found cooking to be fun and continued from there, correct?" The girl nodded at Sasuke, eyeing the unoccupied stool warily. "I picked up cooking mostly out of necessity, but seeing my mother doing elaborate dinners for our guests when she was alive always had made me curious. I wouldn't exactly say that I love it, but it's a very relaxing job once you know what you are doing."

Feeling more comfortable, Hinata sat beside the Uchiha. "I agree. Even though it was stressing at first, cooking eventually became what I try to do whenever I need to wind down." The Uchiha nodded, and silence fell between the two for a few moments, allowing Hinata to release a subtle sigh of relief. _'It's working! How lucky that I didn't even need to bring up the topic myself... I just need to keep this up!'_

Determined, she continued to speak. "About your earlier question... one of the cooks gave me a book about cooking on the wild once I became a genin. She said that I'd have a way to hone my cooking skills even if I didn't have a kitchen nearby," she said with a smile, which fell a bit soon afterwards. _'Why didn't I think of bringing that with me?'_

"I guess it will come in handy today, especially since my team will bring something for us." Sasuke made a mental note to ask her for the book once they returned to Konoha. _'If we return, that is...'_

"Hopefully. Cooking like this doesn't seem to be too complicated from what I've read... but dealing with meats was never my specialty." Sasuke then shot her an incredulous look, much to Hinata's innocent confusion.

 _'...Better than his glare, I suppose,'_ she thought, subconsciously associating what Sasuke had meant to come across as a neutral facial expression with her father's usual disappointed glares.

"What is your specialty, then?" the Uchiha asked, trying to remember if anything on the bento he had eaten for lunch yesterday had stood out as much as the pork.

"Um... I suppose sweet things in general? The best things I can make are cinnamon rolls and red bean soup," the girl confessed with some embarrassment. Not over being good at cooking that kind of food, but at how much she consumed her own cooking. _'I guess the one advantage of being a kunoichi is how much physical exercise I end up doing... I'd end up fatter than an Akimichi otherwise.'_

While Hinata cringed at the mental image, Sasuke cringed from the sensory overload that he got from simply thinking about those sweets. "I don't handle sweets very well, to be honest..."

"Oh, that's a shame... but do you specialize in anything? I-I mean, as far as cooking goes?" Hinata frowned slightly and reconsidered her course of action. "M-maybe your favorite kind of food?"

The Uchiha stopped to think for a moment. "I never share my food with anyone, so I can't say for sure, but I think I work better with seafood than with anything else. My favorite food, though, is onigiri with bonito flakes and tomato... but I rarely eat it nowadays." No matter how many times Sasuke had attempted to replicate his mother's cooking, he had never gotten it to taste as good as hers, for some reason.

Sasuke looked away, and then he frowned. _'I can't believe I forgot who I'm dealing with...'_

Hinata, however, was smiling. _'Hmm... This recipe is also pretty easy to make. It shouldn't take too long for me to teach Sak—'_

"I know Sakura sent you to talk to me for her, but don't share this with her."

"Eh?" Hinata's eyes widened. "H-h-how did—"

"Because unlike Naruto, I actually pay attention to how people act around me. And like I said, don't tell this to Sakura." The Uchiha's face contorted into disgust. "All of the girls in our class—except you—always made chocolates for me on Valentine's Day... but what Sakura gives me every year can't be called chocolate. I'm not even sure it could be classified as food, actually." Just the memory was enough to make him want to puke. Sasuke definitely didn't need to stain the good memories he had of his favorite food with whatever monstrosity Sakura would turn it into.

"I-I see," Hinata replied lamely, trying and failing to find a way of salvaging her mission... while a small part of her wondered if she hadn't underestimated Sakura's cooking ineptitude. _'I guess she wasn't kidding when she said her cooking was 'an absolute disaster', huh...?'_

"But you can ask other questions, if you wish." Sasuke said, turning the Hyuuga's worry into pure shock. However, before she was able to recompose herself and question the Uchiha's out-of-character behavior, Sasuke started talking again.

"To be honest, I don't really feel like conversing with you about that... but I have something important to ask of you, so this should make us even."

 _'Something important...? I wonder wha—No, forget that! Focus!'_ Hinata scolded herself. Sasuke was giving her the chance to get the information she sought without needing to worry about subtlety, possibly pissing him off or dealing with awkward small talk. This was an opportunity that she couldn't pass up... but then Hinata realized a very small detail that was a little bit important.

 _'...I don't know what to talk about! I was so worried about actually starting a conversation with him that I didn't plan on anything else...!'_

It took her a few moments of fidgeting and thinking, but the girl eventually opened her mouth again. "Um... w-what do you think about Sakura-san?"

 _'She just had to ask the broadest question possible...'_ Sasuke sighed with annoyance, giving the Hyuuga beside him the wrong idea until he started talking. "...I don't know how to answer that question. Or rather, I... guess you could say I just don't have enough information."

Now it was Hinata's turn to look incredulously at Sasuke. "W-what? B-but you know each other f-for years!"

"Hn." Ignoring the frustration that his ambiguous "answer" caused to the blunette, Sasuke carefully looked over the small stick he was working with. Finding it to be satisfactorily stripped of its bark, he placed it on the table, grabbed the last stick and started to peel it. "During our years at the academy, she always threw herself at me whenever she had an opportunity, and if someone tried to stand in her way, such as Ino or Naruto, she reacted violently. That was pretty much it."

"...Sasuke-san, I... I understand what you mean, but there is more to her than just that," Hinata retorted, frowning a slightly. The complete lack of shame that the pinkette displayed whenever she tried to woo Sasuke had always bothered her, and Hinata preferred not to think of what she felt whenever the girl lashed out at Naruto each time he tried to compete for her heart with Sasuke... but Sakura had shown a completely new side to her during these past two days, which completely changed her opinion of the girl.

"I realize that," Sasuke said, much to Hinata's surprise. "After what happened yesterday during our training, she seems to be trying to keep her emotions under control when interacting with me and Naruto, at least. It would be unfair of me to judge her for her past when she is trying to become more mature... at least as a person that is."

Of course, Sasuke knew that the Sakura that annoyed him so much was still there. The stunt she tried to pull right after he thanked her for her assistance during their fight with the Demon Brothers proved to the Uchiha that she still could act stupidly when it comes to him, and the girl could only restrain herself for so long before Naruto's foolishness prompted her to react. But he couldn't deny that there was an improvement in her behavior. _'Though now she doesn't seem to know how to react to me for the most part... I wonder if seeing my true self during that genjutsu shattered the idealized image she had of me.'_

While Sasuke was busy trying to rationalize Sakura's newfound hesitant behavior, Hinata was mentally going through what he had just said, committing everything to memory in order to report to her friend at a later point. "Hmm... a-and what do you mean by that?" she asked, referring to his last words.

"The academy isn't the best way of gauging our skill, but it doesn't change the fact that Sakura managed to become the best kunoichi of our class without even having a clan to back her up." Sasuke realized a little too late that his comment might have upset Hinata, but glancing at the girl and seeing her looking at the ground stoically made him think that she wasn't offended by what he said, so he continued. "Even so, she focused most of her determination to win the heart of someone she didn't even know. But she became satisfied with where she was as a ninja and didn't strive to improve once she got past a certain point." He shook his head in disappointment. "That complete lack of ambition... I just can't accept that kind of thinking."

That, Sasuke thought, was the biggest difference between Sakura and her teammates. Naruto wanted to be Hokage, whereas Sasuke wanted to defeat his brother... both of them worked hard so that they could one day accomplish their dreams, but Sakura's priorities didn't seem to be anywhere even remotely relevant to her profession.

Hinata was lost in somewhat similar thoughts, but while the Uchiha felt disapproval and disappointment towards Sakura... at that moment, Hinata felt only envy. She knew it was silly, now that her Byakugan and Gentle Fist increased her abilities exponentially when compared to what she was stuck with at the academy and especially after she had defeated Sakura in an earlier spar, but it didn't erase all the effort she had put into her studies and the mediocre results she got for it. Considering what was expected of her, given her position as the heiress of the Hyuuga clan, she might as well have been the dead last. _'I guess that is the difference between someone that has talent and someone that doesn't...'_

"Now that she's actually taking her job seriously, I don't have any problems with her as a kunoichi," Sasuke continued, snapping Hinata out of her musings. "She might not be strong right now, but... today's fight proved to me that there's nothing wrong with that," he concluded, remembering their earlier battle against the Mist chunin.

Sasuke would've been lying if he said that he wasn't disappointed by how he ended up being more of a support than a heavy-hitter during their fight, but given how both of their spars in the previous day went, he knew the pink-haired girl wouldn't have lasted a second if he wasn't there to keep Gouzu busy. Their original plan was to have Sakura work as a distraction to create openings for him, but he had underestimated the chunin's abilities and failed to land a finishing blow on the older ninja when he had the chance to end their fight. The Uchiha's attacks, however, proved to Gouzu that he was the bigger threat between the two... but by focusing on Sasuke, he had left himself vulnerable to be picked off by a much weaker foe, culminating in his defeat.

"I see... thank you for answering my questions," Hinata said, smiling shyly at Sasuke. _'That wasn't as bad as I thought... and I got much more information than I expected, too. Sakura-san will be happy to hear this!'_ the girl thought excitedly.

"If you truly want to thank me, then return the favor and answer my questions," Sasuke replied curtly.

"Ah! Um... s-sure! W-what do you want to know?" she asked, watching as the Uchiha inspected the small stick he had just transformed into a skewer. _'He could have just used chopsticks...'_

Finding it to be just as good as the other two he had made, the boy placed it on the desk and wiped the bark powder from his once-clean white shorts, before turning to face Hinata. "I need to know somet—"

"Hey, we're back everyone!"

Looking in the direction from where they heard Sakura's voice, Sasuke and Hinata saw the remaining members of Team 7 entering the camp. The two genin looked a tad bit dirtier than they had been before leaving, but Kakashi looked no worse for wear. The silver-haired jonin was holding two decently sized rabbits on his hands, both of them no longer alive.

"Yo, welcome back," Kiba greeted the trio with a friendly smirk that disappeared as soon as he took a good look at Naruto. "Why is the most energetic person that I know of walking around like a zombie?" he asked, observing the Uzumaki's hunched over posture and exhausted expression.

The question was enough to make Sakura frown and shoot an angry look at the blond. "Because this idiot finally learned that his "awesome" jutsu is not the right answer for all of his problems," she growled, making Naruto shrink under her gaze.

"Naruto almost passed out from using the Kage Bunshin no Jutsu too much today," Kakashi clarified as he passed the pair of dead rabbits to Sasuke, who placed them on the two wooden cutting boards that were on the table. "We also managed to find some wild onions and wild garlic," he added, grabbing a small scroll from his flak jacket's pocket. "I didn't really have anything to put them on, so I sealed them in here.

"...That's fine. But I need more water," Sasuke said, grabbing the scroll from Kakashi. "Can you fill some of these pots for me?"

"I still don't get it," Naruto whined tiredly, yawning as he watched Kakashi fill the second iron pot with a simple water jutsu before moving to do the same with the plastic ones scattered across the table. "There are times when I make many more clones than today and I never get this tired..."

"That's because the jutsu evenly splits the chakra between you and the clones," Kurenai explained. "After a clone pops, the chakra gets sent back to the user and any of the clones that are nearby. But since you had your clones walking for a long time—and under a transformation, no less—barely any of your chakra returned because the clones consumed it throughout their lifetime..." The jonin thought a bit and then scowled. "How many clones did you try to make?"

"Uh, about ten?"

"In that case, I am surprised that you are even alive," Shino interjected, visibly frowning from beneath his sunglasses. "If the jutsu works as Kurenai-sensei explained, you likely had about 20% of your chakra when the Demon Brothers attacked us, and about 3% when we decided to find a place to camp... trying to create ten clones would have brought you to 0,3% of your chakra," Shino concluded. _'Just how much chakra do you have, Naruto?'_ he wondered, remembering how his bugs had actually gotten full from draining chakra out of the blond during their previous spar, with Naruto seemingly not even noticing the drop in his reserves.

"He got lucky that Kakashi-sensei knew that and dispelled the clones, but all of _that_ managed to scare away the rabbits we had found." Sakura huffed, crossing her arms in front of her chest. _'Almost gave me a heart attack, too. Reckless idiot...'_

"Whatever, whatever..." Naruto grumbled. "I'm going to take a nap till dinner is ready," the boy said dismissively, marching towards the red tent that he would later share with Sasuke and Kiba. Unknowingly to him, Hinata was closely observing his movements. The girl had a worried expression on her face as she watched Naruto enter his tent while grumbling something about stupid rabbits. Hinata thought about asking if he was okay, but she knew that he would say he was fine—even if he wasn't.

Right before she redirected her focus to said stupid rabbits, Hinata caught a glimpse of Sakura, who was looking at her. The pinkette smiled and then glanced at Sasuke and back at her. Hinata smiled back as an answer to the unspoken question, prompting Sakura's smile to grow even wider. Nodding in appreciation, Sakura then went to follow Kakashi and sat on a bench near the other members of Team 8 to chat while they waited for dinner.

"Do you think these two rabbits will be enough for everyone?" Sasuke spoke up, eyeing the rabbits skeptically. "We might need to cook a bit more of rice to compensate for this," he said, pointing at the pair of dead animals.

 _'Hmm... no, they are just big enough to be sufficient for everyone. There might even be a bit of meat remaining,'_ Hinata concluded, analyzing the rabbits much like Sasuke had done beforehand. Then, an idea came to her. "You are right; we might need to cook some extra rice."

"Got it... before I start with the rice, do you need any help with those rabbits?" he offered, seeing the girl grab a knife from the nearby cutlery box.

"Don't worry about me, Sasuke-san. I can handle this," the girl assured him, smiling. "Oh, do you mind if I answer your questions during dinner?" she asked, hoped to avoid any distractions while she was working.

"...No, not at all," he nodded understandingly, leaving Hinata alone so that both of them could focus on their respective jobs.

 _'Now, let's see if I remember everything correctly...'_ the girl thought as she prepared herself to skin one of the rabbits.

* * *

Night had already fallen when the two genin finally finished preparing the group's dinner, and both Hinata and Sasuke were busy, serving everyone.

"Here, Tazuna-san. I hope you will enjoy it," Hinata said, offering a plate with rice a generous piece of rabbit meat to the old bridge builder, who was sitting on one of the rock benches Kurenai had built. The girl smiled proudly, confident that she and Sasuke had done a good job despite the lack of certain conveniences they were used to have at their kitchens, such as free access to running water, or a place to dispose of the garbage that wasn't a hole dug by Akamaru.

"Heh, thanks girlie." The man returned her smile with a grin of his own. "If the smell is anything to go by, you can bet I'm gonna like this! Anyways, like I was saying," he turned to face the other members of the group, "you kids don't need to worry about any bandits. Pretty sure all of them hightailed from here once Gatou took control of our ports, if they haven't been hired by the bastard himself to become mercenaries in the first place."

"And Gatou should only be figuring out that the Demon Brothers failed by now," Kakashi piped in as he nodded appreciatively at Sasuke, who had brought his food to him. "If we are going to run into any trouble, it will be after we land. But why don't we drop this morbid subject and discuss something else? How about telling us more of your country's culture, Tazuna-san?"

While the group listened to Tazuna's tales, Hinata and Sasuke continued to serve the others. As the blue-haired girl passed a plate of food to Sakura, the pinkette motioned for the girl to come closer.

"Come on, I'm dying to know what you found out," Sakura whispered, excitement barely contained in her hushed tone. "Can you sit with me so that we can talk a little?"

"I-I'm sorry, Sakura-san," Hinata shook her head. "Sasuke-san needs to talk to me and... and I-I'll be eating there with him," the bluenette elaborated, turning to point at the desk where she and the Uchiha had prepared their food. Sasuke was already there, re-sealing the items that were still in the way.

"Oh! I see... well, go on, then!" Sakura said, offering a strained smile to her friend. "We can talk before sleeping... but what does he want to talk about?"

"I... I don't know. S-Sorry," Hinata mumbled, lowering her head slightly. This made Sakura frown at her.

"Sheesh, stop apologizing! Go see what he wants before your food gets cold, ok?" she suggested right before tasting a piece of the roasted rabbit meat. "Hmm! You definitely should eat it while it's still hot. This is really good! And I don't even like garlic..."

"Wild garlic is a bit different than the one you usually eat, but thank you!" Hinata smiled and turned around to join Sasuke, who was already eating his own food.

 _'Figures... the one girl that never paid attention to Sasuke-kun is the one he ends up inviting for dinner,'_ she thought bitterly, not at all considering the possibility that it was Hinata who made the offer, given the girl's shy personality.

Blissfully unaware of the envious look Sakura was aiming at her—but very much aware of how a certain blond was happily wolfing down the contents of his plate—the Hyuuga made her way to the other side of the camp, where Sasuke was waiting for her.

Not too soon after she sat down on the unoccupied stool and started eating, the girl's curiosity won over her. "So, um, what did you want t-to ask me?

"It's about Naruto. I know you have been watching him constantly, even outside the academy, so—"

He stopped once Hinata began choking. "Y-you... know about that...?!" she asked in a shaky voice as she tried to breathe normally, blushing fiercely.

"Everyone knows about it. Besides Naruto, I suppose." Sasuke shrugged.

"...Awesome," she mumbled in a voice that was far too low for the Uchiha to hear. _'And I thought I was doing so well in hiding myself, too... just how many people know about this?'_

"Anyways... you know about how my brother single-handedly wiped out basically the entire Uchiha clan, correct?" Hinata nodded as Sasuke used the pause to eat a bit more. She clearly remembered that quite a few Hyuuga were bragging about how they were now the strongest clan of Konoha in the days following the massacre. The thought of being that happy because of so many deaths made her sick.

"Ever since I've recovered from the coma Itachi left me in," Sasuke continued, "I've been devoting my entire life—every single moment—to become strong enough so that I could one day kill that bastard and avenge my clan. I've lost count of how many times I've relived the events of that night in my nightmares... and my hate for him only grew stronger each time."

"I... I see," was what Hinata managed to say as an answer. Now, she finally knew how to describe the fire she saw in Sasuke's eyes whenever she happened to look at him while they were still at the academy. Even now, she could still clearly see the hate burning within the Uchiha's black orbs, but it was more subdued than usual.

And yet, that had nothing to do with Naruto. "But... why are you telling me this?"

"Because yesterday, Kurenai told me and Sakura that Naruto has demons just as big as Itachi is for me. Do you know what she might be talking about?" The idea that a happy-go-lucky fool like Naruto Uzumaki was being tormented by something on the same level of the Uchiha massacre was simply unbelievable to Sasuke... but the way Naruto had refused to even look at him or Sakura when Kurenai had said that made him believe that there was, indeed, truth to the Genjutsu Mistress's words.

Hinata stopped eating altogether and turned to face the Uchiha. "...Did sensei use those words, exactly?"

Sasuke raised an eyebrow upon seeing how the girl suddenly adopted the same serious mask her clansmen were famous for wearing. "Yes, but how is that relevant?"

"I... I have heard people using the word "demon" when talking about Naruto-kun before. Only the adults. A few times, I even saw some villagers calling him that to his face... but he didn't seem to understand why they were yelling at him like that." The girl looked back at the blond, who was listening to Tazuna attentively. She couldn't help but note the contrast between his smile and the hurt, confused expression he wore one day, years beforehand, when he had tried to play with some kids in the park, only for their parents to hurriedly "rescue" them from the "demon". _'He looked so lost... and lonely.'_

The Uchiha analyzed her words carefully. "So I take it that you don't know it either?"

Hinata shook her head morosely, to which Sasuke sighed. "I-I've tried to ask around before but... everyone refuses to answer me. They just tell me to not get near him, or that he is... dangerous."

Before they could continue to talk, though, the subject of their conversation stood up and approached them, practically forcing Hinata and Sasuke to stay silent and focus on their food.

"Hey, where can I leave this?" the blond questioned, holding up the plate he had used during dinner.

"Just seal it on this scroll," Sasuke replied, pointing to one of the small sealing scrolls that were on the table. It contained a few of the dirty items that had been used during cooking, and they would be unsealed and washed again after the group arrived at Tazuna's house.

"H-hold it!" Hinata called Naruto just before he touched the scroll. Her mind went blank for a moment when the boy's blue eyes became focused on her, and she scrambled to think of something to say. "Uh... F-food! D-do you want it? There's more!" she blurted out quickly, before cringing.

"Uh... what?" Naruto frowned. The girl had spoken so fast that he failed to understand a single word of what she had said.

"Tsk. What she means to say is that we made a little too much food, and that you could eat more if you wish to," Sasuke clarified. The boy wondered where the confidence the girl had been displaying while they were cooking went.

"I-I-I thought that y-you'd be hungry... after... after w-what happened while you were hunting... a-and there's still some meat left," Hinata added, this time much more slowly thanks to her wise decision of not staring at Naruto's eyes, despite how much his blue orbs fascinated her. The effort cost her; however, as she couldn't keep the worry from seeping into her tone like she had wanted to.

"I thought that was for Akamaru," Naruto remarked, unsure. He had been eyeing the remains of the bunny for a while now, but he was sure that neither Sasuke nor Hinata saw him, since they were focused on each other.

"I've seen Kakashi-sensei sneaking him quite a few bits of his food," Sasuke said. "He won't need that."

"Oh... alright then!" Naruto happily exclaimed, approaching the pot of rice with a foxy grin on his face. "I'm always up for more food, especially if it's this good!"

"Sasuke-kun's cooking was delicious, wasn't it?" Sakura asked as she approached her blond teammate. She then grabbed the scroll Sasuke had previously pointed at and opened it in an unoccupied corner of the table. The girl sealed the plate she used inside, a process that Naruto watched intently from the corner of his vision, happy that he didn't have to ask how to do it and embarrass himself. He knew that Sakura would scold him for not paying attention to what they were taught at the academy, and he wasn't in the mood to hear that same speech yet again.

"But I also really liked the rabbit! The taste was wonderful," Sakura continued, reflecting the smile that had blossomed on Hinata's face upon being complimented. "Don't you agree with me, Naruto?"

"Mmmn," he mumbled, mouth already full with rice. "Thed rhabish whash dilichwosh!"

"Naruto! Swallow your food before talking! Geez..." Sakura scolded him and trotted back to her seat as she repressed the urge to insult the blond.

"Uh, thanks for the food," Naruto quickly said before following after Sakura, wondering if Hinata had blushed because of his bad behavior. Meanwhile, Sasuke was silently giving a disapproving glare to both of them. While he was indeed bothered by his teammate's rudeness, his lack of etiquette was one of the few things Sasuke didn't have the heart to complain about, considering the blond's circumstances.

He also had seen Sakura subtly mouthing "good job" to Hinata right before leaving.

 _'She has been planning for this moment all along...'_ he realized, glancing at Hinata. The girl's cheeks were rosy, and she had a small smile on her face as she watched her crush. There was a familiar, dreamy look in her eyes that he had seen aimed at himself countless of times. _'She did seem to be genuinely worried about him but... she might be just as dangerous as Sakura.'_

After eating more of the meat she had cooked, Hinata addressed Sasuke again. "If... if you don't mind me asking, why did you want to know that?" The girl also wondered why he had been looking at her as if she were some sort of threat, but didn't say anything about it.

"Yesterday... Naruto promised me that he would one day help me exact my revenge. I... If he was willing to do this much for me, I am honor-bound to return the favor in the future."

Hinata tilted her head to the side slightly. "But... why not ask him yourself?"

"From what Kurenai implied, he'd need to trust me first," The Uchiha answered, shaking his head. "Not just as a teammate, but as a friend. I... and I really don't have a clue of how to become his friend. It has been years since I last considered forming that kind of bond with anyone," he confessed, lowering his head. The words that "Itachi" had said to him the day before were still ringing in his mind.

"...It's scary, isn't it?" Sasuke looked up, only to see Hinata gazing fondly at her own teammates on the other side of the camp. Kiba was gesticulating wildly as he questioned Tazuna, in stark contrast to how Shino stoically listened as he ate his food. The former's loud, boisterous nature and the latter's silent, cold behavior made the prospect of being in Team 8 downright intimidating.

She then turned to him, smiling empathetically. "Our situations might differ a little but... my teammates were my first friends, too. At first, I... I really didn't know how to even interact with them. I thought that they would've thought I was too stupid or too weak and that they would hate me... and yet, it didn't take long for us to become friends. It... just happened."

Hinata had to admit that she had been lucky, though. Both the Inuzuka and the Aburame clans were known to be very group-oriented, and despite their differences, both Kiba and Shino had shown interest in forming a bond with her and each other. Lonely as she was, Hinata had clung very quickly to them, and even though she still felt awkward around them at times, she was happy that everything worked out between them.

The black-haired boy paused to reflect on her words. "So you are saying that I should just give it time?"

"Um... something like that." Hinata wasn't completely sure of what she had been trying to say, either. "But there's another issue... Naruto-kun sees you as a rival."

Sasuke smirked. Naruto had never, ever, been a threat to him... but he had never given up on trying to defeat his rival. As much as he would never be caught saying that to him, he admired the blond's willpower. Despite never lasting more than 10 seconds in their fights, Naruto repeatedly challenged him throughout their years at the academy.

 _'But why would that be a problem?'_ he thought, before voicing the question aloud to Hinata.

"I... I could be wrong," Hinata warned, frowning a little, "but I don't think he will ever see you as a friend while he's trying to compete against you." The girl then focused back on Naruto, who was laughing in the midst of a conversation with the other three genin while the adults quietly chatted among themselves.

"I might not know what this demon the adults talk about is, but I believe that what truly haunts him is... loneliness."

 _'...Loneliness, huh?'_

Sasuke was no stranger to that feeling. But in his case, it was corrupted by the hatred he felt for the one that took his family away from him. Naruto, though, never had those bonds in the first place. _'And yet, he doesn't really seem bothered about it,'_ Sasuke noted curiously.

Looking over to Hinata, he saw the pained expression the girl wore as she watched the young Uzumaki. "If you truly want to help him... then be there for him when you see him struggling," Hinata continued, oblivious to how Sasuke was watching her. Finding herself unable to continue talking, the girl silently worked on finishing her dinner.

 _'Is she just that empathetic... or is there something troubling her, too?'_ Sasuke wondered, as he too decided to eat what was still on his plate. Thankfully for the duo, their food was still warm enough for them to eat comfortably, despite the tense silence that formed between them.

* * *

Not too long after dinner, the genin and Tazuna went to sleep while the two jonin decided to take turns watching the camp. Despite knowing that the chances of an ambush were small, and that Kurenai's strong genjutsu and Shino's kikaichu were working as defense mechanisms—in addition to a fake camp that Sakura and Kakashi had set up far into the woods while Naruto still had been recovering from using too much chakra—the two jonin decided to be extra careful.

If nothing else, it would at least ensure that the genin would feel safe enough to have a good night of sleep.

Kurenai had the first watch, but Kakashi was accompanying her for the time being due to being too tense to sleep just yet. This had the bonus of giving Sakura and Hinata the privacy they needed to discuss each other's findings, too. Without Kurenai or anyone else around, they were free to talk as much as they wanted, as long as they weren't too loud.

Or giggle as much as they wanted, which was what Sakura was currently doing. "Thank you so much! I'm glad to know Sasuke-kun's opinion of me is improving!" Smiling brightly, Sakura pulled her hair into a low ponytail, effectively avoiding a nasty case of bed hair once she woke up; she wouldn't have time to wrestle with her long tresses in the morning after all. "My dedication is starting to pay off already...!"

 _'...I wonder why Sakura-san acted liked that. She seems to be aware that he doesn't like it, but I don't get it,'_ Hinata thought, as both herself and her pink-haired friend got inside their respective sleeping bags.

"But that's quite a lot of stuff you found out," Sakura commented as she tried to make herself comfortable in her sleeping bag. She looked over to the side where she could hear something being zipped down and some ruffling sounds. There was barely light inside the tent, however, so she couldn't say for sure what the noise was.

"Y-yeah... I'm surprised Sasuke-san was willing to talk so much," Hinata confessed, struggling a little to fold her tan coat in the darkness. She didn't want to remove it outside, where people could see her, even though the task would've been much easier.

"Well, Sasuke-kun's not very fond of people, but I'm not that surprised. You are pretty easy to talk to, you know?"

 _'Not really. I wish it was the other way around, though,'_ Hinata thought with annoyance, remembering her earlier failure to speak with Naruto after their battle.

"And you said he had some questions earlier. What was that all about?"

Hinata then proceeded to give the second part of her "report", this time not omitting any information from it (she deemed it unwise to mention what Sasuke had said about her chocolates).

"...That's it?" Sakura couldn't contain the disappointment from seeping into her voice. "So he... he only wanted to help Naruto? But... well, whatever." The girl sighed. _'No point in whining about how he didn't say anything about me when he only talked to Hinata because she stalks Naruto. And then again, he knows what the best way of repaying me for helping against Itachi would be. He just doesn't want to do it. Not yet, anyways. Besides, I did say that I was going to focus on training, so I can't be running after him all the time even if I knew what to do. And Naruto seems to have his own problems too... I need to give him some attention now and then, or else he will never open up to me. If this "demon" is really something as bad as Sasuke-kun's brother, then we need to deal with it as soon as possible.'_

The silence made Hinata start fidgeting."Um... Sakura-san? Are you asleep?"

"Huh...? Oh, Hinata! Sorry, I just got lost in thought. Anyways, on the topic of Naruto, I, uh, wasn't as successful as you were," she confessed, playing with one of her bangs. "We didn't really have any time to talk without someone else being there... but I think you need to interact with him some more before I can hope to get anything significant out of him. Something beyond just giving him food or fighting with him, perhaps?" she suggested playfully.

"B-but... it's so difficult! W-whenever he is around I-I-I can't find the right words to say and, and I start stuttering and—"

"Whoa there, calm down!" Sakura whispered, and a short, frustrated sigh was the only thing she got as an answer. She wasn't expecting Hinata to react like that. "Look, I understand that it is hard, but you need to take the initiative! If you can't get out of your comfort zone, you will never get to be anything more than a friend to him!" She blinked twice, and then sighed. _'Man, I guess I need to follow my own advice...'_

Sakura's last sentence rang on her head, and Hinata felt the need to kick herself. Sakura was trying to help her make Naruto fall in love with her, but a friendship is as far as Hinata could take her relationship with him. _'I should've realized I was misleading her sooner... I'm such an idiot!'_

The girl curled up inside her sleeping bag. "M-maybe... I-I think... I sh-shouldn't try to be anything more than... just a friend to him. T-that would be enough for me, actually..."

"...What?" It took Sakura a moment before she could properly understand what the Hyuuga had just mumbled. "Wait, _what?!_ Are you kidding me?!"

"P-please, not so loud...!" Sakura froze as she realized that her little outburst might've drawn attention to themselves. She hadn't even been that loud, actually, but considering how silent everything around them was, the volume had been loud enough to potentially draw attention to themselves.

They came to the unspoken decision to stay silent for a minute in case one of the jonin came to check on them, and both girls used the time to think of how to continue their conversation, but Sakura went first.

"Why are saying this now, Hinata? This doesn't make sense! Especially not considering how you tried to bait him with your cooking earlier. Twice, even!"

"L-look, t-this... this is just a crush." Hinata swallowed. "I mean, w-we are so young and, and... h-he barely even knows I exist, s-so t-there is no point in trying to... I-I-I'll p-probably get over this in a few months."

"You can't seriously—"

"I'll be going to sleep now," the shy Hyuuga interrupted, audibly faking a yawn and turning around, which effectively ended the conversation right there.

"Hinata?" Met with silence, Sakura called for her friend again, and receiving no answer, the pinkette huffed indignantly and also turned away. The fact that Hinata didn't explain herself, though, left Sakura to form her own conclusions about the subject.

 _'Man... her shyness surely is worse than mine when I was younger. But I won't let a little lack of courage keep her from trying! Sure, if she wants to become friends with Naruto, I'll help her out. Nothing stops me from playing matchmaker while I'm at it, hehe.'_

Smiling to herself, Sakura had a feeling that, unlike in the previous day, she would have a good night of sleep. Hinata, however, wasn't so sure about her own situation.

 _'I'm sorry Sakura-san... but you wouldn't understand,'_ Hinata thought, remembering what had happened to her when she returned home the day before.

Namely, how her father had decided to delay her duel with her sister once again, all because of the C-rank mission she was assigned to. Considering how worn out the girl was when she came home, Hiashi had told her that resting and preparing for the mission was more important, since not only the results of the duel wouldn't be fair, but it would not let her rest properly to endure a full day of traveling.

As much as the elders disliked the decision, they all agreed that it was better than possibly shaming the Hyuuga clan via a poor performance during the mission, and allowed the duel to be rescheduled to one day after her return.

But Hinata knew it was just borrowed time. The duel's result wasn't going to change—her sister would inevitably win and become the heiress, while Hinata would be stripped of her birthright and would likely be married to a noble as soon as she was of age. Of course, her future husband would be handpicked by her clan, and unless he had something significant to offer to the clan, they would never be considered. The actual heiress of the clan wouldn't have as many restrictions... but since that wasn't going to be the case for Hinata, making Naruto fall for her would possibly be the worst thing she could ever do to him.

The Hyuuga clan's traditions were often obtuse, and Hinata knew she wouldn't have been able to explain it properly to her friend. That and her own shame of admitting that her seven-year-old sister was stronger than her—even though she had never sparred seriously against Hanabi—was enough to keep the shy bluenette tight-lipped about the subject.

 _'Besides, I'm not worthy of being loved by Naruto-kun. If that ever happened,'_ she thought as tears started to form in her eyes. Not out of sadness... but out of guilt. The same guilt that stole her voice at the end of her conversation with Sasuke. _'I knew that Naruto-kun suffered because he's always been alone... I knew, for years and I did nothing. I never had the courage to befriend him... I'm such a coward.'_

Unbeknownst to either girl, Sakura's loud reaction to Hinata's words didn't go by unheard. Kakashi's sharp ears had detected a sound coming from near the girl's tent, and the man stealthily approached it to see if anything was wrong.

In the end, he happened to overhear the last part of the conversation between the two young kunoichi, and even though he didn't get to hear the beginning, it had been enough for him to fill in the holes and shake his head. It worked both as a signal to Kurenai that he had found nothing wrong... and as a gesture to himself, one that conveyed the disappointment he felt; even though he knew that people don't change that easily.

 _'It seems the little Hyuuga still has a ways to go before she learns to trust in others. I wonder if this is related to why she decided to give up on passing my test yesterday...'_ Kakashi thought, walking back to where Kurenai was waiting for him.

"Kakashi," the woman began, "I understand that you don't feel like it, but go to sleep. You know that tomorrow we will most likely be attacked by a jonin."

The Copy Ninja sighed. "I suppose you are right... I guess I'll need all the energy I can muster for tomorrow." It had been quite a while since he had last been involved in a dangerous battle, after all.

And he knew that their next opponent wouldn't be as easy as the Demon Brothers were...

* * *

It was not too long after breaking camp in the early morning that the group met Tazuna's friend, Kaji, who had helped Tazuna to arrive in the Land of Fire and now would be taking all of them to the Land of Waves with his trusty boat. The ride wasn't exactly comfortable; there was hardly any free space with ten people aboard, but it was their only option.

"We are almost there," the middle-aged man eventually commented as he continued to paddle. "the bridge should be close by now." He couldn't say for sure, since the thick mist that surrounded the boat left him unable to see more than a few feet in front of him, but even though the time passed extremely slowly for everyone, Kaji had a good grasp on how much time they had spent traveling the ocean.

Soon enough, the massive, unfinished structure of steel and concrete started to become visible.

"Wow...! It's gigantic!" Naruto exclaimed, amazed. The biggest bridges he had seen back in Konoha weren't much longer than 60 feet, but even though it wasn't complete, Tazuna's put them all to shame. He had never seen a crane before, either, so the big yellow machines that could be spotted through the bridge were news to him as well.

"Keep it down, boy!" Kaji scolded him. "We can't risk being seen. I already told you this when I turned off the motor, didn't I?

"Yeah, shut up," Kiba agreed. "I can't concentrate with you yapping like this."

Pouting, Naruto turned away and kept quiet. As much as he wanted to talk back to the Inuzuka, he knew that the boy had an important role to play. With the use of a jutsu, he could detect smells and sound much farther than Hinata could see with her Byakugan, but he wasn't skilled enough to maintain the technique while moving. The boat ride, however, took care of that problem, leaving the young Inuzuka to be the group's scout for the time being.

"Guys... I hear something. A... boat, I think. Doesn't seem to be too big," he concluded, sniffing the air. He detected traces of wood alongside the salt water from the ocean.

Kiba's announcement made Kaji stop paddling immediately. "Are we in danger?"

"No, they are going southwest... they just entered my range for an instant, I guess," the boy finished, shrugging. The noise from the boat's motor had been faint, and now it could no longer be heard.

"Sounds like they just came from the main island's port," Tazuna spoke. "Likely headed to one of the Land of Fire's own ports, if I had to guess"

"Could it have been one of Gatou's men?" Sakura inquired, looking around warily as their boat started to move once again.

"There's no one else it could have been," the bridge builder spat disdainfully. "I told you this before: he bought all of the ports in the Land of Waves. It's almost impossible to enter the sea without being found out by Gatou's punks, unless you are part of their gang to begin with. He controls the sea... and considering how the Land of Waves isn't much more than a bunch of small islands, it means he controls everything. This bridge is the only way to free our country from this tyrant's control," the old man said, staring glumly at his unfinished masterpiece as their boat passed beside it.

Eventually, the bridge disappeared as the group entered in a dark tunnel...

Naruto could only stare in wonder as the visage of the Land of Waves appeared right before his eyes once the tunnel ended. Without any mist clouding his vision, he could see wide wooden houses built on platforms around the edges of the ocean, and almost all of them were built far from each other, separated by large bodies of water or forested areas; if not both, considering that quite a few plants were seemingly growing on the water, some of them having their roots visible above the water's surface.

It was a stark contrast to the Leaf Village, known for having multiple houses packed together, to the point where many were stacked one above the other. The woodland of Konoha had been, for the most part, artificially made by the Shodaime Hokage's Wood Release and rarely occupied the same space as the villager's houses. A single river was the only body of water that crossed the village, and hardly on the level that the ocean divided the small town they were in.

"Heh, you seem impressed," Tazuna remarked, feeling equal amounts of pride and surprise from seeing the blond's awed expression. The Land of Waves was a poor country, but it had a rustic beauty of its own, too. "Never been outside your village, boy?"

"Yeah... it's a far cry from Konoha, that's for sure," he commented, before becoming extremely confused. _'Wait, are those plants growing in salt water...? Is this actually a lake? But didn't we come from the ocean?'_

Not too long after entering the village where Tazuna resided, the boat stopped a dock and the eight shinobi dropped off, alongside their client.

"Kaji, thank you. I know that you took a big risk in helping me."

"It's not much, but I'm glad I could still help. I'm sorry that I can't take you closer to your home, but it's too dangerous in here," the man said, noting that Sakura had already drawn a kunai as if expecting an attack. Wishing Tazuna good luck, the man turned on the motor of his boat and sped off to his own house, on the other side of the island.

From there, Naruto, Shino, and Hinata once again used their abilities to ensure they wouldn't be ambushed as they continued to travel through the village. They didn't spend more than a few minutes in there, as they had to pass through a forested area in order to arrive in the neighborhood where Tazuna's home was.

 _'There's another difference,'_ Naruto mused. _'Everything is connected by streets in Konoha... I wonder if the central part of the village is like this,'_ he thought, remembering that they were just on the outskirts of the village.

While Naruto was still comparing what he saw to his own hometown, Shino was quietly taking note of the wildlife his bugs could sense all around their path. _'If we had to camp in the forest, there would be a good variety of animals to choose for dinner. Or we could always eat rabbit again,'_ he reasoned, having encountered one hiding in a bush far ahead of the group's location.

Much to his confusion, the rabbit remained hidden. Shino's bugs told him that there were no natural predators around it, and the animal wasn't even looking for food or shelter... but before he could try to make sense of the creature's odd behavior, the few bugs he had sent to scan the treetop areas further ahead found something else.

"I detect a shinobi with jonin-level reserves hiding in the treetops further ahead, facing away from the water's edge," he reported, pointing at the large body of water that was just to the side of the road. "The clones should be arriving at where he is in a few minutes, but that part of the road is on a wide clearing and they could be attacked at any moment."

As soon a few of his bugs detected that the unknown enemy was, the Aburame then ordered all of them to stop draining the supposed assassin's chakra and scout his surroundings. The Demon Brothers had been too furious to think straight upon realizing that they were tricked, but Shino was sure that a jonin would be more attentive to their own reserves. Furthermore, forcing their enemy to flee before they could get any information on them would be less than desirable, and there was a chance that the assassin might have a partner hidden somewhere... but the kikaichu found no trace of another person nearby.

After listening to Shino, Kurenai used one of Naruto's kage bunshin to deliver the order to stay put, whereas Kakashi chose to address the group as a whole. "Now listen carefully everyone: this enemy is practically guaranteed to be a jonin. You performed well against the Demon Brothers, but this time, let us take care of the enemy. Focus solely on protecting Tazuna, and we will protect all of you in turn."

"But... what if you two get defeated, sensei?" Sakura asked in a calm tone. Her features were firm, and anyone that didn't look at how her hands and legs were trembling would be fooled by her facade.

"...If that happens, you all should abort the mission immediately and try to find someone willing to take you back to Konoha. You won't stand a chance against someone good enough to kill both myself and Kurenai, but they shouldn't pursue you if you stop protecting Tazuna."

Sasuke grimaced. "So we are to leave Tazuna to die? Just like that?"

The Uchiha's question made the old man scowl. "Don't be stupid, kid. If your sensei dies then there's no way I won't follow next. I'd rather not see youngsters like you lose their lives protecting a walking corpse."

There was a finality in Tazuna's words, as if the fact that he could be killed at any moment didn't bother him anymore. It made all of the genin realize that, despite being told about the dangers of being a ninja multiple times in the past, none of them were psychologically ready to face a situation of certain death just yet.

They all also realized that it would be difficult to escape anyone good enough to kill Kurenai and Kakashi, even if they abandoned Tazuna to his death. The enemy could kill them for fun, or "punish" them for their cowardice.

"Kakashi," Kurenai started talking, "It's unlikely that our enemy will be as stupid as those chunin that our students defeated. Should we still try to operate in the same way as before? They might flee once they discover that their target was fake."

"You may be right," Kakashi conceded, "but we should at least gather some intel on them while we have the chance. Tazuna-san, if the enemy can't be defeated now, we might need to send your daughter and grandson to live with someone else until the mission is complete. Our job will be much easier if we only have to worry about your safety."

The old bridge builder nodded. "Fair enough. That can be arranged."

"Sensei, if I may?" Both Kakashi and Kurenai nodded to Shino. "The enemy is positioned in such a way that he can't be easily ambushed. He is perched on a tall tree in front of a clearing, and my bugs haven't found a position from where we could spy on him with Hinata's Byakugan without being found out first. Furthermore, his back is positioned in a way that makes approaching him from his blind spot unoptimal, as it would require going through the lake... and my bugs have just reported that a great amount of the water is contaminated by chakra. I don't know what exactly this jutsu does, however."

"Hmm... I think I know what he did..." Kakashi mumbled, scratching his chin thoughtfully. "Going into the water is a death sentence, but it should be safe for us to walk over it. And this suggests that our foe is a suiton specialist, likely from the Mist, too."

"...Well, what do you think we should do, then?" Kurenai asked Kakashi, deferring the leadership to the more experienced shinobi. She was a jonin, but her promotion had been quite recent... especially when compared to someone that became a jonin at an age younger than his own genin currently were.

The silver-haired man sighed. The lack of intel on the enemy ninja would be detrimental to any plans they might make, but something needed to be done. "If they flee, we need to get to Tazuna-san's house as fast as possible to set up our defenses to protect the house—and by extension, our client. But if the enemy kills the clones without being seen, then they might go ahead and try to ambush us again. In that case, here's what we will do..."

* * *

As Shino had described, there was someone hidden in the upper part of a tall tree, patiently waiting for Tazuna and his escorts while under the covers of the tree's thick foliage.

A man named Zabuza Momochi.

Soon, the decoy squad passed near his hiding spot. _'Hmph... of course the demon brothers would have failed. Even I would have trouble going toe-to-toe against Kakashi, the Copy Ninja,'_ Zabuza mused, remembering the extensive entry the son of the White Fang had on the bingo book. The bingo book was where one could find information on shinobi wanted by hidden villages which includes missing ninja AND active ninja from all villages (though it goes without saying that bringing the body of an active ninja to their own village won't do you any good). It was an essential tool for any jonin, and especially vital to bounty hunters and mercenaries like him.

Zabuza himself could be found in that book, too. Being the ex-leader of Kirigakure's assassination squad, as well as a member of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist, his track record was nothing to scoff at. Though he wasn't pleased that the picture they had of him in the book still showed him wearing the Mist's jonin uniform—an outfit he no longer had any pride in after his village took a turn for the worse under Yagura's rule. His headband, though, he still wore with pride. It proved that even as a missing-nin, he was loyal to Kirigakure itself instead of just being one of the Mizukage's toy soldiers.

Some details about his looks didn't change, however: his brown hair was still spiky and short, and he still wore bandages in order to hide most of his face. But instead of a jonin uniform, Zabuza only significant articles of clothing were baggy cyan pants. Over his chest, he only had the leather straps that he used to hold his gigantic sword: the Kubikiribocho. After all, when you can consistently kill your enemies with a single strike, and without taking any damage... who needs armor?

Though Zabuza considered that an opponent of Kakashi's caliber might have made wearing chainmail a worthwhile investment, the jonin's attitude made him rethink that. _'They are all somewhat tense, but not even Kakashi is making any effort to watch out for enemies. Heh, it almost looks like he doesn't care at all.'_

Behind the bandages covering most of his face, Zabuza grinned. His job would be much easier—not that it would've been hard to begin with, he thought—if his foes weren't actively looking out for him. Still, Kakashi's behavior intrigued him. Even if Konohagakure's standards were lower than Kiri's, a jonin wouldn't be acting like that.

Then a thought came to him: _'Maybe... he really doesn't care. Could it be that one of those brats is a sensor-type?'_ As much as he knew that those kids hardly could be considering ninja, support-type abilities could make bringing an inexperienced novice into an S-ranked mission worthwhile. It would certainly explain why Kakashi didn't seem to feel threatened. _It's a good thing I always suppress my chakra while waiting to ambush people. But this complicates things... I don't know which of the brats is the sensor. I guess I only have one option, then.'_ he realized.

Zabuza's plan was simple enough: he'd toss his sword at the group and kill all five of them in a single maneuver. It was definitely a risky move, but he couldn't target the kids individually with kunai and shuriken: any jonin worth their salt would easily recognize the noise of the projectiles coming and react accordingly. Using jutsu would not do him any good if he wished to not risk having his cover blown by the sensor, and of course, approaching them head-on would make said sensor detect him easily despite his suppressed chakra signature.

And thus, he threw his blade. Naruto's clones never saw Zabuza's massive broadsword spinning towards them.

But then again, Zabuza could have never imagined that his targets were only shadow clones, either...

* * *

"All of my clones died... and I have no idea of how it happened. Sorry..." Naruto reported, sighing. When he looked up at Kurenai, he expected her to scold him for not being able to give her any good information, but to his shock, the woman was smiling at him.

"Thank you, Naruto." The moment was brief, however, as she turned to Shino right afterwards.

The Aburame was aware of her movement, but remained silent as he sent his bugs back to where the enemy was. "They haven't moved," he constated after a few moments.

"I'll be going, then."

With those words, Kurenai ran towards the assassin's hiding spot, going through a few hand signs as she did so. After the last one, her body sank into the ground, leaving no trace of the woman's presence.

That is, unless you had senses as sharp as Kiba did. "That's the same jutsu you used on me and Hinata yesterday, right?" he asked, looking at Kakashi.

"No, this one is the Doton: Moguragakure no Jutsu. You could say it is a "cousin" jutsu to the Headhunter," the man clarified. "You can't drag someone with you, but it is more subtle and faster to move around with. Now, let's follow after her, just in case she ends up needing backup." Kakashi said, walking alongside the road once again.

Part of this subtlety that Kakashi referred to was related to how much noise it made. Kiba noted that while he had managed to hear Kakashi burrowing underground with ease until he had fully sunken in, Kurenai's technique was almost completely silent; though he considered that expanding his senses would've allowed him to track her down.

This held true even when the woman emerged from right behind the tree where Zabuza was hiding himself, and thanks to that, she went by undetected by him.

But one look at the man's enormous weapon, and she paled. _'Zabuza Momochi?! This isn't good... he is probably the worst enemy we could've had the luck of facing in this mission.'_

Seconds later, the mist assassin groaned and fell to the ground, knocked unconscious by one of Kurenai's strongest genjutsu. Walking towards him, she slit his throat, wetting her hand in the liquid that leaked out of the wound.

It was then that the corpse exploded in a cloud of smoke and water, which splashed all over Kurenai.

Expecting an attack coming from her blind spot, Kurenai turned immediately and tossed a few shuriken, only to see a silhouette standing above the water, as mist started to gather around the entire area. The sound of steel striking steel told her that the shuriken were blocked.

"How disappointing... I was expecting to fight Kakashi Hatake of the Sharingan, you know? People like you, who rely only on cheap illusions, don't make for terribly exciting fights. But I commend you for the smart use of the Transformation and Shadow Clone Techniques. I just hope you don't mind me taking inspiration from that, Genjutsu Mistress."

Kurenai gritted her teeth. She didn't even need the Byakugan to know the man was smirking underneath his bandages. _'Fuck, I've gotta go back to Kakashi! This is not someone I can take by myself, not like this!'_

As she once again used the Moguragakure no Jutsu, Zabuza started laughing as the mist around him got thicker and thicker...

The hunt was just beginning.

* * *

"What is the meaning of this...?"

Shino was only mumbling to himself, but Hinata had been close enough to hear it. The palpable confusion on her usually self-assured teammate's voice was enough to make the girl start worrying. "I-Is something wrong, Shino-kun?"

"I... believe so. I lost connection with almost all of the kikai I have sent to scout our surroundings. Only the ones that are scouting the area directly behinds us are still under my command.

Kakashi scowled deeply, but remained calm. "Hinata and Kiba, tell me what you can find out."

Hearing the jonin's command, Hinata activated her Byakugan while Kiba focused to expand his senses.

Once her range of vision got larger, Hinata immediately paled. "A-A large area in f-front of us is shining brightly, l-like chakra! M-m-my vision gets b-blurred if I try to see through it!"

Afterwards, Kiba gave his own report. "Kurenai-sensei is going back to us, from underground. She should be here in a few seconds." After sharing what he could find out by listening to his surroundings, he gulped. "I... can also smell something that reeks strongly of dried blood up ahead and... I-it's coming our way! We have two minutes at most!"

"Hey, hey, what is going on?! What do you mean?!" Naruto asked, looking over the genin of Team 8, as well as Akamaru, who was beside Kiba and watched the forest ahead of them warily. Their vagueness was both irritating and scary, but the panic written over their faces, perhaps, was even more terrifying. His teammates didn't have particularly happy expressions, either.

"We've got trouble," Kurenai said, popping out of the ground like a mole and startling the blond. "It's Zabuza Momochi. He used a shadow clone to trick me, and his Kirigakure no Jutsu is already affecting the area up ahead."

"Dammit," Kakashi cursed, noting that the area surrounding them was quickly becoming obscured by a white mist. He then turned to speak with the six genin. "Listen, Kurenai and I will be fighting this enemy. You all are going to sneak through the forest and go back to the docks by yourselves, and until we return," he pointed at Kiba, "you are in charge of leading the team."

"...What?! Me?!" the boy pointed to himself incredulously. "But why?! W-what about Shino or Hinata?"

"Usually they would be better fit to direct you around the forest, yes," Kurenai agreed, a grim look on her face. "But the chakra-based mist of the Kirigakure no Jutsu makes communicating with kikaichu almost impossible for most Aburame, and only very advanced Byakugan-users can see through it without being blinded by the chakra. Sadly, this also gets in the way of casting all but the strongest genjutsu."

This news made Sakura clutch her kunai even more tightly. She would be back to square one as long as this mist was in play... and worse, that also meant Kurenai would be severely handicapped during the fight that would soon begin.

Kakashi then continued. "But the mist shouldn't block your senses from working, so you are the best choice to lead them. Understood?" Kiba hesitated, but after an encouraging bark from his partner, he snapped out of it and nodded firmly to Kakashi.

"Regardless of who wins this battle, the mist should lift up when it ends, so Shino's bugs will be able to tell you who it is. If we win, you are to return to where we are as fast as possible. If we die—even if we take Zabuza with us—you know what to do." With his orders issued, Kakashi lifted his headband, revealing the three-tomoe Sharingan that was underneath it. Before a completely and utterly shocked Sasuke was even able to process that information, the man gave them one last order as he drew a kunai. "Now get out of here!"

"Come on, let's go everyone! He's almost here!" Kiba warned, before he and Akamaru dashed in the direction of the forest. Tazuna and the remaining genin followed him as best as they could, taking care to not get lost in the mist.

But just before they all entered the forest, Kiba's nose was suddenly assaulted by the stench of dried blood that he detected earlier, coming from right in front of him instead of a few hundred meters in the direction Kurenai had gone to.

"You won't be going anywhere!"

The Inuzuka realized right then, that the stench came from the sword wielded by Zabuza... a massive sword that was just about to decapitate him and a good portion of his fellow genin in a gigantic swing, until a blur appeared in front of them and a dull clang could be heard.

"Ah, so you know more than just genjutsu, eh? Maybe you won't be such a boring opponent after all, Kurenai Yuhi," the swordsman taunted, noticing that his sword was blocked by Kurenai's hands. The blade hadn't hit skin, though, being instead held at bay by a pair of big, rock-like gauntlets that the kunoichi now wore.

Though shocked by the sudden appearance of the two jonin and disoriented by Kubikiribocho's strong smell, Kiba only needed a couple seconds to gather his bearings before dashing towards the foggy woods again, steering away from where the Mist jonin was. "Guys, follow me! Be careful so you don't get lost!"

As the genin and Tazuna hurried to escape, Zabuza overpowered Kurenai's block by pushing the spine of his sword with his right hand, forcing the kunoichi to jump away to avoid being bisected. He didn't have time to rest, though, as Kakashi appeared right next to him. Not at all impaired by his sword's massive size and weight, Zabuza swung it quickly enough to stop the kunai that was coming down on him.

"Heh, so you were here after all," Zabuza remarked as he tried to force his way through Kakashi's defenses. "Good. I was looking forward to this fight." Despite his boisterous words, Zabuza realized right away that things just had gotten significantly more complicated. _'The bingo book says he has the dog summoning contract... if I run away or try to go after the bridge builder, he can track me down even in the mist. I need to trick them both or kill Kakashi right here, but can that eye of his see through my mist? It's bad enough already that I can't use most ninjutsu without him detecting it...'_

"Earth Release: Earth Flow Spear!"

Hearing Kurenai's voice, Zabuza chakra-jumped back into the mist, narrowly avoiding the thin stalagmites that almost pierced his torso. _'Dammit, Gatou said that there would only be one jonin!'_ he cursed, all while manipulating the chakra from the nearby lake's water to speed up the creation of a basic water clone.

"I'm sorry," Kurenai said as she appeared behind Kakashi, standing back to back with him. "I didn't think he would be able to track me down."

"Hahahaha!" Zabuza's mocking laughter could be heard from within the mist. "I was trained to kill people without even needing to see them! The Moguragakure no Jutsu is useless against me." The swordsman usually didn't share his secrets; he wasn't stupid... but discouraging Kurenai from playing hide and seek while he had to face Kakashi was worth it. He knew that the jutsu would've allowed her to track him down given how it lets the user detect their surroundings via magnetic waves.

"Don't worry, I don't blame you," Kakashi answered to Kurenai, ignoring Zabuza's words but speaking loud enough for the assassin to hear him. Making use of the fact that his mask didn't let Zabuza see his mouth moving, Kakashi continued to speak, though his next words were barely more than a whisper. "He's still more-or-less in front of me, and there's a water clone circling us to attack you."

Said clone tried to strike almost immediately afterwards, but Kurenai parried the slash with her rock gauntlets, and after briefly stopping the flow of earth chakra on her right hand for the gauntlet to fall apart, she quickly grabbed a kunai and shot it at the water construct's neck with enough force to pierce it completely, dispelling the clone. A single hand seal later, and the gauntlet had reformed completely.

The next two minutes were spent with Zabuza testing the two jonin, by creating a few more water clones and having them attack in various patterns. He was aware of the Sharingan's ability to perceive chakra and increase reaction time, but he needed to test how far it could go before making the decision to stay or flee. The latter option would only be possible with a body flicker or a Water Release: Shadow Clone Jutsu, and both of them would be easy for Kakashi to spot unless he was sufficiently busy.

Using normal suiton techniques would require molding his chakra right in front of him, giving his position away even with the mist acting as a curtain and with him suppressing his chakra to remain hard to detect. However, thanks to having a nearby water source and enough skill with Water chakra manipulation, the Mizu Bunshin no Jutsu could be executed in a subtle way if only one or two clones were to be made, and would not require the user to mold any of their own chakra.

His intentions weren't lost on the two Konoha jonin, but they couldn't go on the offensive right away since they would leave big openings while Zabuza was out of sight. Nonetheless, the more time the assassin wasted on them, the easier it would be for their students to escape safely... but they also couldn't allow the swordsman to go after the kids or win the fight by attrition.

As Zabuza circled the pair and created more clones to fight them, he noticed that Kakashi and kurenai were constantly shifting their positions so that Kakashi was always facing him, and that Kurenai's reaction time was too good for someone who supposedly wasn't aware that an attack would come. _'He can see that I'm creating clones and he's warning her of when they are going to move...'_ he realized. _'Dammit. Thanks to that blasted dojutsu, I would need Haku's help to separate them... but that's not an option right now.'_

Letting out a sigh, and smirking slightly when he heard an interesting noise from one of the bushes behind him, he strapped his sword to his back and made one last clone. He was now with his back to the forest, but it was too far away from the water for him create more mizu bunshin with chakra that wasn't his own. _'It's gonna take a good chunk of my reserves, but I'll have to slow them down with a strong ninjutsu and go after my true target.'_

Unbeknownst to Zabuza, there actually was a way for him to keep creating clones to make his escape, which was by using the water of the clones that had fallen in combat to the two Leaf jonin. This was a fact that didn't escape Kakashi. _'Good, there's finally enough water for both of us to create a water clone without using a hand seal.'_

It was time to put his plan into action, the Sharingan-user decided. "Use the water around you to make a clone at your eight; I have one twenty meters away from me in the same direction," he whispered to Kurenai, and after waiting one second, he substituted himself with the clone. Kurenai deactivated her gauntlets and followed almost immediately afterwards.

With Zabuza trying to flee from the scene, and both Kakashi and Kurenai trying to reappear close by to ambush him, it came as a surprise to all three of them when they were suddenly face-to-face with each other after trying to execute their respective plans.

Reacting first, Kurenai tossed three shuriken at the bare-chested man before going through the seals to reactivate the Fist Rock Jutsu. Not having the time to draw his heavy broadsword again, Zabuza grunted and used a mere kunai to block the projectiles, before focusing on defending himself from Kakashi's own kunai, ultimately locking blades with the silver-haired man.

"Going somewhere, Demon of the Hidden Mist?" Kakashi taunted, staring straight into Zabuza's brown eyes. Refusing to grace that with an answer, the swordsman tried to knee him, only for Kakashi to counter with the exact same movement. Zabuza barely had time to feel shocked, as he was forced to hop backwards to dodge a slow punch from Kurenai, which was followed up by a significantly faster kick that ended up striking Zabuza's abdomen. The swordsman stumbled backwards a few, but not before tossing his kunai at the woman, which she simply punched away.

"I've had enough of this!" Zabuza roared, once again grabbing his greatsword and rushing at the two Konoha jonin. Believing that Zabuza had simply lost his patience, they simply waited for the assassin to strike again. One block and one counterattack is all they would need to kill Zabuza.

Neither could really believe it when they realized that Zabuza had thrown the Kubikiribocho at them, and were almost too late in scrambling to dodge the massive projectile that the spinning blade became. Zabuza smirked when he saw that Kurenai had jumped to the left but Kakashi had jumped to the right, just as the angle he had thrown the sword had been designed to do. _'Looks like I won't need Haku's help after all,'_ he commented to himself, pleased that his gambit paid off. Running away could wait.

He immediately pursued the Genjutsu Mistress, going through a few seals as he did so.

Though there was no better way to dodge Zabuza's unexpected attack, jumping into an area which couldn't be seen had risks of its own. Unfortunately for Kurenai, she only realized that her flight path would have her head colliding with the thick branch of a tree after the sharp pain on her skull made itself present. It was enough to leave her off-balance and ruin her landing, leaving the kunoichi sprawled near the roots of the tree.

"Water Release: Water Bomb Jutsu!"

Not wasting any time, Kurenai made good use of her previous misfortune and slammed her hand into the ground and shouted as loud as she could: "Earth Release: Mud Wall!"

As earth techniques are resistant to water techniques, Zabuza's attack was completely stopped. Using that window of time, Kurenai burrowed underground and located where Zabuza was, but instead of trying to surprise him, she simply reemerged behind her mud wall. The fact that she didn't go anywhere made Zabuza frown as he kept running towards the wall, but he had little time to dwell on that as Kurenai vaulted over the mud construct and tried to match him using a kunai.

Being used to swinging a much heavier weapon, Zabuza's strikes were significantly faster and stronger than the usual jonin's, and it took only two strikes to disarm Kurenai, and another to pierce her through the chest. "You idiot."

He felt a cool, metallic blade on his neck at the same time that he realized that water was dripping out of Kurenai's wound instead of blood. "Looks like I'm about to cut your throat again, Zabuza."

"Looks like you are about to be fooled by a shadow clone again, Kurenai," Zabuza whispered in her ear, pressing his kunai against her jugular as the clone Kurenai was threatening popped in a cloud of smoke, this time without a drop of water involved. "And not another step, Kakashi, or I'll kill her," he threatened, turning around with Kurenai still made hostage. Kakashi wasn't even ten meters away from him.

 _'So this is the real Zabuza...'_ the Copy Ninja concluded, observing with his Sharingan as a decent amount of chakra traveled from the smoke cloud into Zabuza's body.

"Place your kunai back in your pouch and throw the whole thing away. And dispel that stupid water clone that is trying to sneak up on me." Kakashi hesitated but did as Zabuza ordered.

The silence was broken by a splash, followed by Zabuza's laughter. "Did you really think you'd get the upper hand on me with my own technique? A cheap copy? Please."

 _'Why do my enemies never consider that I might have copied techniques from someone else already? Does he seriously think that this is the first time I ever saw water clones despite being a jonin for over a decade?'_ Kakashi resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He didn't need to make his job any harder after all. "You talk as if you were planning to spare her."

"Heh, listen, I was hired to kill the bridge builder and possibly the one jonin that would be accompanying him. Fighting two jonin isn't on my contract, and there is no way my employer will compensate me for my troubles." He then made a shallow cut on Kurenai's neck, "You are only alive right now because of the Sharingan. If not for that, I would have completed my mission with no problems."

"What is your point?" Kakashi asked, scowling. _'Almost there...'_

"Let me offer you a deal: destroy your left eye, and I promise to not harm you or any of the Leaf shinobi that came with you... that is, as long as none of you try to get between me and my target," he scoffed, "but without your eye, I'm sure that you won't be stupid enough to keep this going. So what do you say, Kakashi of the Sharingan?"

"...Alright."

 _'Well, that was quick,'_ Zabuza though, as he watched Kakashi rip out the eye that made him so famous. _'I knew these people from Konoha are stupid enough to value things like friends and family above themselves, but... really?'_

"Are you sure you want me to destroy it?" the jonin asked, staring at his bloody hand with the only working eye he had left. "This would make you a fortune on the black market."

Zabuza laughed, this time without a mocking undertone. _'This is priceless'_ , he though, shaking his head in disbelief and answering Kakashi's question with the same motion. "After I grab my money from Gatou, I won't need anymore." If his plan worked, he would gather an army of mercenaries, crush the Mizukage and get the hat for himself... so it's not like he wouldn't end up rich anyways. _'Besides, I can't risk meeting whoever gets the eye in the battlefield one day.'_

"So aren't you going to release me, Zabuza?" The question was met with silence. She was neither threatened nor freed. Zabuza was completely still.

"It should be safe now," Kakashi said

Kurenai then disentangled herself from Zabuza's grasp, careful to not disturb the illusion he was trapped in by stepping on his toes or causing him pain in any other way. As she walked, the world around her started to spin, but even though she was wobbling, Kurenai managed to reach Kakashi.

"You alright?" he asked while preparing a jutsu. The woman merely hovered her hand above her wound, a green aura indicating that she was using the Mystic Palm.

"I think there was poison on that kunai, but I'm taking care of it. And you?"

"I lost almost one fourth of my chakra because of the Sharingan, but I'm fine." he answered. The sound of chirping birds could be heard as a mass of lightning started to form on Kakashi's hands. The man then started to run towards the dazed Zabuza, intent on piercing him through the chest with his unique jutsu: the Chidori.

His Sharingan picked up Zabuza's chakra flaring when he was but a second away from the swordsman... but Kakashi didn't think that breaking out of the genjutsu would have made any good for Zabuza. He was going too fast for the man to dodge, and there was no way he would be able to use a substitution with anything.

When his hand blasted through what once had been a beautiful, white-furred snow rabbit, he realized how wrong he was.

* * *

"Bastard... I can't believe that the Sharingan's genjutsu can generate enough Yin chakra to work inside my mist," Zabuza commented to himself, panting slightly.

He had reappeared over a bush, beside the tree where his sword had lodged itself. He had left that rabbit close by, behind his ambush spot just in case he needed an emergency substitution, and had trained the animal to stay still even if sensing danger nearby. It proved to be a worthwhile investment, as the little animal remained hidden even though the Kubikiribocho had violently struck a tree that was only a couple feet away from him.

Dislodging his sword from the trunk it had been lodged on, he quickly strapped it to his back and concentrated. Hearing Kakashi and Kurenai's voice in the distance, he body flickered deeper into the woods and made a sequence of seals.

"Let's see if they can survive this! Water Release: Giant Vortex Jutsu!"

Though it consumed almost all of Zabuza's usable chakra, his technique formed a gigantic twister of water, ripping apart the forest's floor with ease as it traveled towards where Kakashi and Kurenai had been heard. "This will send them straight into the lake, so if the uprooted trees and boulders don't kill them, they will drown instead. And even if they try to go underground, the water current is too strong for that to work. It will push them out of the ground and they will die anyways"

Turning his back to the destroyed remains of his previous battlefield, he lifted the mist straight ahead of him and started to make his way towards his next targets.

"They can't survive. Now... time to show to those brats what a real shinobi is supposed to be."

* * *

A/N:

Wow. This chapter was a massive struggle to pull off.

I dunno if it's just me being tired from my new job, but not a single part of the chapter was easy to write. Especially troublesome was the fight scene, but I wrote that scene at home so I can't blame my job for it, lol.

Anyways... I apologize for leaving you all with this cliffhanger, but as I'm sure you noticed, this chapter is a _little_ big, and I would delay it all even more if I wanted to conclude the day's events in one go. Also, unlike this chapter, the storyline of the original chapter 9 is very much reusable, but I can't stretch it long enough to make it into a bigger chapter (I think), so this guarantees that it won't be a short update since the second part of this scene will happen there.

I hope the scenes prior to the battle were satisfactory... and that the fight scene wasn't too crappy. My beta seemed to have liked it, but I don't feel very confident about it.

Also, I should be going back to college in a few days, and thanks to that, I will have very little free time on weekdays. I do hope that I will be able to manage everything well, but chapters might end up being a little shorter from now on, or I might have to delay it a little bit... I'm sorry if it comes to that.

So, from now on, you will see a status update in my profile just in case the four weeks pass and there's no new chapter posted, as a whole new topic in the table of contents. And like I said before, there's also a word count for the next chapter in the profile too.

Lastly, special thanks to reviewers _Perentie Fan, Vallavarayan_ and _Meow382_ for giving me a few ideas that I used in this chapter! And apologies to the latter, since I talked about a certain SakuHina interaction that was supposed to happen chapter 7, but it got cut... and despite me having the opportunity, it also didn't happen in chapter 8. It will show up in chapter 10, though.

And I probably should stop being a jerk and remember to publicly thank SimplePotato, who does the beta work for me. I already thank him a lot IRL, but yeah.

I guess that was pretty much it. Hopefully you enjoyed this chapter, and will be looking forward to the next one! Thank you for your support! looking forward to see what you guys think will happen next!

* * *

Changelog

1.0 to 2.0 (07/17/16)

Polished the entire chapter, from adding some details to fixing typos and grammar. Usual stuff to those that read this bit.


	9. Chapter 9 - A Glimpse of Hell

Yo, people!

First of all, again, sorry for the delay. Long story short, job+college took a lot out of me for the first week or so, and I barely got any writing done... which by itself wouldn't be that bad, but it messed with my writing schedule and I ended up having to edit the fic on weekdays, and THAT is the major culprit for this. But like in the previous chapter, I ended up shoving enough extra content to compensate for the delay, I believe.

And... before you begin, I have important things to tell you guys about the "Clone" family of jutsu. I really should've explained that better before... but what is done is done, so let's get this over with.

The basic Clone Jutsu: Similar to a projection, but is considered a ninjutsu (you can't dispel an enemy's clones by stopping your chakra flow, so they can't be genjutsu), can follow simple orders at the time of their creation, and disappear when hit. This jutsu, as well as the Transformation and Substitution Jutsu, cost minimal amounts of chakra to perform.

Shadow Clone Jutsu: Solid clones able to think and act on their own just as much as the original. The user's chakra level is always divided equally between the original and clones. Their memories and roughly 90% of a clone's current chakra returns to the original (and any clones that are sufficiently close) when it dispels, but if a clone runs out of chakra then none of it returns. They dispel after a certain amount of damage is taken, and the more clones you make, the more time you need to focus the chakra. There are more details on these specific subjects that the next chapter will touch on, though.

Basic "material" clones (ink, wind, mud, water, wood...): They have limited thinking when compared to shadow clones, but almost always have superior defense and added utility coming from the material they are made of, though some kinds just have an added effect applied to when they dispel and nothing else. With a natural source of the "material", the chakra cost is practically zero. Without, it's still pretty low, but it's not a negligible amount.

"Material" shadow clones: Essentially, they are the same as the above clones, but they have all the perks of the Shadow Clone Jutsu's clones: memory transfer, chakra transfer, and intelligence. But these clones have less usable chakra despite taking the same share from the original (because part of their chakra is converted into the "material" they are made of) which means they last less and can't abuse ninjutsu as much, if at all.

Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu: Creates lots and lots of clones by default, but requires a bit more concentration—and time—to pull off when compared to the normal Shadow Clone Jutsu (not to mention chakra, but the one person that makes use of this jutsu simply doesn't care for that requirement most of the time).

(Thanks to _xNaruHina_ and _Yasha-HebiHime_ for reminding me about this...)

So, that's how these techniques work in my AU. Pretty similar to canon, but not quite the same. With that done... well, I'd just like to say that writing this first scene was very, very hard... but hopefully it will make up for the last chapter's cliffhanger. Now, on with it!

* * *

 _Land of Waves arc_

Chapter 9: A Glimpse of Hell (Current Version: 1.0)

* * *

While Zabuza kept Kurenai and Kakashi busy, Tazuna and the six genin were trying to run as far away from the conflict as they could, just in case the swordsman ended up victorious. As such, they were currently running through the woods that surrounded the road they had been using up to that point.

Unfortunately for them, Zabuza's Kirigakure no Jutsu was strong enough to cover the entire area they were in, and the thick mist made obstacles such as trees become visible only at the last minute, which made their escape a harder task than it initially looked like.

Kiba was currently leading the group, using his and Akamaru's sense of smell to adjust the group's path so that they eventually would end up in the port from where they landed a few hours beforehand. Their sharp noses also worked well to help them dodge the trees, bushes and the rare boulders that were in the way. Besides the Inuzuka and his ninken, Hinata was the only other member of their party that wasn't having many problems in traversing the woods. Her Byakugan lost roughly 80% of its current range thanks to the chakra in the mist's composition and her own inexperience, but ten meters were more than enough for the girl to work with.

The other genin, however, weren't as lucky. This was especially true for Naruto, who had been ordered to stay a little behind everyone else to help Tazuna (who couldn't keep up with trained ninjas) keep track of the group's movements, thanks to the blond's bright orange clothes. This also meant that he had to periodically make sure that the old man was still behind him, an easy job that only required him to turn his head every once in a while.

One look at the bridge builder told Naruto that the man wouldn't be able to keep running for much longer. The boy, however, had no time to ask if Tazuna was alright.

"Gah!"

With a dull thud, Naruto's body fell to the ground, his feet snared in a tree's root. "Damn... stupid mist!"

"Naruto, you okay over there?!" Kiba's voice could be heard, but the boy was too far into the mist for the blond to see him. The few instants he lost by falling down were more than enough to hide the other genin from Naruto's line of sight.

"Yeah, I'm fine! I just tripped over a root..."Naruto grumbled, taking a brief glance around himself as he tried to get up. He could see the faint outlines of trees and bushes, but the area was mostly an unsettling white blur no matter where he looked. He then saw a silhouette coming from the mist, who soon revealed itself to be a nervous-looking Hinata Hyuuga.

"Here," she said, offering a hand to the fallen Naruto. Any hesitation or apprehension she might have had about making so much contact with her crush were forgotten due to the gravity of their situation.

"Hey, thanks!" The blond gratefully accepted the help and got up, standing face to face with the girl after releasing her hand. At such a proximity, he couldn't help but note the popped up veins surrounding the girl's eyes. _'Funny, the Byakugan makes her look kinda intimidating even though she's scared,'_ Naruto mused.

"Ah, i-it was nothing!" She then took a rather big step back, finding the blond to be uncomfortably close. Not even the mist around them was enough to hide the redness on her cheeks.

"O-Oi! Can't you brats... slow down a bit!?" Tazuna's voice rang from right behind the duo, startling both. "Darn it... I'm too old for this shit," the man ranted, panting from the exertion.

The other four genin and Akamaru then doubled back.

"Fine, but we can't stay still for long," Kiba barked, looking serious. "That guy might pop up at any minute." The boy then closed his eyes and concentrated, expanding his senses to check on the battle that was raging on behind them.

"Why are we going through this forest anyways? Using the road would be much easier," Naruto whined bitterly as he tried to get rid of the leaves and the ground stains on his precious orange clothes.

Sakura then gave him a look that told him he was missing something obvious. "Naruto, did you see the size of that guy's sword? He can't swing that thing properly with so many trees around. At least not unless we stumble into a wider area."

"...Oh."

"Additionally," Shino piped up, "there's no nearby source of water for him to use. That is, assuming that he is indeed a water specialist."

"…Looks like our sensei are still holding up," Kiba constated, having found no traces of fresh blood in the direction they had come from, and hearing the clangs of steel striking steel. "But that Zabuza fellow is still there, too. We should get going."

Tazuna looked at him with wide eyes. "Already?"

Kiba scowled. "Look, I get that you can't run as well as we can, but—"

"No, it's fine," the man cut him off. "I put you all in this mess, and I still need to find a way to take you all back to Konoha."

"What about... Kaji, was it?" Sakura asked tentatively, remembering the man that had brought them to the Land of Waves.

"He lives too far away," Tazuna replied, lifting his straw hat to scratch his head. _'Dammit... I didn't think too much of it at the time, but nobody at the docks will be willing to help them... running away is useless.'_

The bridge builder, however, wasn't the only one that had realized that.

"This won't accomplish anything." Sasuke's simple statement drew all eyes to him, allowing everyone to see his deep scowl. "Without a boat, outrunning that assassin will be impossible. If he beats Kakashi and Kurenai without being too hurt himself, he won't let us escape."

An uneasy silence reigned over the forest after Sasuke said the truth nobody had been willing to admit.

Surprisingly, Shino was the one who resumed the conversation. "You might be correct... but this is the only option we have left if we are to prepare for the worse. There's still a possibility that we might live if we can flee."

"...But it took us over a few hours to get here after we landed. I don't think that their battle will last that long," Sakura countered, gulping despite her attempt to mask her fear.

"Look, I know that even ninja kids like you can use chakra to run fast and jump over long distances," Tazuna said. "The only reason you aren't doing that right now is because I can't keep up, so if you just lea—"

"Don't even think about it," Kiba growled dangerously, interrupting him. "We're not leaving you behind."

"Then what do you propose we do, Inuzuka?"

Kiba met Sasuke's cold gaze with a burning glare. "No, you answer me that! If you say that running is useless, then you ought to have a better plan in that genial head of yours."

The Uchiha heir crossed his arms in front of his chest and closed his eyes. "...I don't have anything."

As the Inuzuka rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath, Naruto saw an opportunity to outdo his rival. "Hey, what if we go back there and ambush that guy?"

"That's moronic, not to mention suicidal and directly against Kakashi-sensei's orders." Shino dismissed the idea immediately, frowning openly.

"Exactly!" Naruto agreed, seemingly unfazed by the Aburame's sharp reply and the confused looks everyone was giving him. "He will never expect it!"

"Sorry, but that won't work," Kiba disagreed, and Akamaru barked in support of his master. "That guy... I overheard him talking to Kurenai-sensei after we left. His hearing is better than mine. That's not the kind of guy a bunch of genin can sneak up on."

"Even so, can we really just leave this to them?" Sakura asked. "Kurenai-sensei said the mist screws with genjutsu, and that's her specialty... and, well, this... Zabuza, is probably pretty comfortable fighting in this mist." Despite her words, Sakura couldn't quite believe that anyone would be able to fight well in such an environment.

"I think Naruto's plan has some merit," Sasuke said, surprising everyone. "The element of surprise can make even an academy student defeat a Kage."

"B-but... we can barely see anything in here, either," Hinata countered meekly, avoiding the Uchiha's intense gaze when his eyes fell on her. Even her Byakugan was impaired by the mist, allowing her to see no more than ten meters in any direction. Anything past that, and the bright glow of chakra became too strong to be seen through, and what little her eyes could still see more clearly was somewhat blurred. "We... w-will just g-get in the way."

"Going back is not an option," Kiba declared, looking at the members of Team 7. "Look, I get that you guys don't want to run away like this, but you all need to have more faith in our sensei! ...Even so, we still should get going." With that conversation done, he then faced the bridge builder. "You okay already, Tazuna-san?"

"I can run for a few more minutes, yes..."

"Kiba, perhaps it might be wise to run at a slower speed so that we have to stop fewer times?" Shino suggested, making the Inuzuka stop to think for a moment.

"Yeah... I guess that's for the better." He nodded to the Aburame. "So let's go, then! We shouldn't have to put up with this shitty mist for much longer. If this thing is strong to mess with Shino's bugs and Hinata's Byakugan, then it must cost a good bit of chakra to sustain."

"I hope you are right, kid," Tazuna commented as he started to run alongside the young genin.

After a few minutes of traveling silently, Hinata perked up. "Ah, I can see again! There's no mist up ahead!" Though a lot of the area covered by her dojutsu were still only blue blurs, the small but clearly visible areas on the corner of her vision were enough to bring great relief to the girl.

"Finally," Sasuke muttered, annoyed. "I was getting tired of this mist."

"Yeah, this mist sucks," Naruto agreed, still bitter by his earlier fall.

Soon, the group finally left the area affected by Zabuza's jutsu. Though the actual scenery didn't change much from what they had seen so far, all of them were glad to leave the mist behind them.

"Ah, awesome! I missed the smell of fresh air!" Kiba said, happily sniffing the air as they continued to move. The mist had a weird scent, somewhat akin to stale air and stagnant water, that Kiba was getting sick of.

They barely got a few meters away from the mist when Kiba's smile fell, just as a familiar scent of dried blood made itself known to him. " _Shit!_ Guys, he's here!"

Before any of the other genin could gasp or mutter a curse, a silhouette appeared from within the mist, approaching them slowly. "Look at what I've found... a bunch of brats that fancy themselves ninja. What a joke," the swordsman spat, his voice laced with disdain.

"R-Run!" Tazuna bellowed, legs shaking from the effect Zabuza's killer intent had on him. "Leave me here and save yourselves!"

In spite of their earlier conversation, the kids started to turn around to flee, but then Zabuza spoke once again. "You know... I don't take kindly to _cowards_."

His comment—the unspoken promise that attempting to escape would result in certain death— reinforced by a sudden spike of killing intent on that last word, froze the genin in their tracks.

"Well, since you all decided to stay, how about we make this a bit more... _fun_? I'd like the chance to relax a little since it took quite a bit of my chakra to kill your sensei," the Mist jonin stated, stepping out of the mist.

Sakura gasped. "No...! It can't be!"

Zabuza laughed at the girl's denial and the spooked expressions everyone had. "Well, since the esteemed Copy Ninja and the Genjutsu Mistress failed to end me, I guess it falls to you six to protect that poor fool from me, huh?"

"Form a circle around Tazuna!" Sasuke shouted, and his fellow comrades quickly complied. Their circle hadn't been much more than two manji formations put together, with Team 7 protecting Tazuna from the front and Team 8 from the back

"Good start." Zabuza drew a kunai. "I guess you brats might be worth keeping alive for a bit. Let's see... I have a game that we can play."

"A... game?" Naruto asked, wondering if he had heard the man in front of him correctly. Zabuza was a decent distance away from them after all.

"Yes. Do your best to defeat me in the next few minutes... and whoever impresses me the most doesn't die. I won't even attack the bridge builder to make it easier for you, as long as he doesn't try to flee, of course." Not that Zabuza thought the man could do it. Unlike the genin, Tazuna was completely paralyzed by the assassin's killer intent.

"Is this really just a game to you, bastard?!" Naruto yelled, enraged. His fury waned when he felt a presence behind him.

"The game begins now," Zabuza whispered in the boy's ear, his volume just loud enough that all present would hear him. The assassin smirked underneath his mask as the boy shuddered, and he could practically smell the fear coming from him and all of his comrades as they were starting to realize what kind of enemy they were facing.

Reacting the fastest out of everyone else, Sasuke, who was right beside Naruto, whirled around and slashed at the assassin. Not even bothering to dodge, Zabuza locked blades with the boy, forcing the Uchiha to his knees in the second they clashed, thanks to the older man's superior strength. "Fast, for a genin..." Zabuza observed.

Sensing another person moving somewhere behind, he quickly broke the blade lock and used the Kawarimi no Jutsu to replace himself with a small log, effectively avoiding Hinata's palm thrust. He, however, could not avoid her eyes. "He's at my 9 o'clock... 40 meters, leaning against a tree. T-there's no mist around him..."

Though Zabuza's wording suggested that they would be competing with each other for the right to leave this battle with their lives; Kakashi had taught them better than that. The six genin knew that their only chance of surviving was to work with each other.

"We will be vulnerable if we stay in the open," Shino remarked, maintaining his calm, stoic tone despite their situation. As he spoke, a few of his bugs stealthily made their way towards Zabuza so that they wouldn't miss him again if he ventured beyond the range of Hinata's Byakugan.

Kiba smirked. "Cover, coming right up!" With that declaration, he popped another of his smoke balls by tossing it on the ground. In the same motion, a special soldier pill also hit the floor, where it remained for just one second before being swallowed by an eager Akamaru.

"We should go to him before his patience runs out," Sakura said through gritted teeth as her vision, once again, became obscured.

In contrast to his pink-haired teammate, Naruto broke into an excited grin. "Heh, I've got a plan! Do you guys remember how Hinata and I kicked ass yesterday?"

"I see... simple and effective," Shino noted, pleased that his strategy was going to be used once again. As he and four of the genin went through the seals of the Transformation Jutsu, Naruto opted to use only a single seal, taking a few instants to focus his chakra in order to complete a different technique.

"Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu!" he yelled, and right after his friends completed their techniques, the area was flooded with chakra constructs in the blond's likeness.

"And what now?" a disguised Sakura asked, looking at the Naruto she believed to be the original

"We are going to have to improvise," Sasuke answered, his voice sounding exactly like Naruto's. "His hearing is too good for us to plan anything deeper than this."

"W-what about Akamaru-kun?" Hinata asked, observing that the ninken had copied his master. The transformed dog stood out like a sore thumb, even among a multitude of Narutos.

"Don't worry about him, Hinata. He knows what to do" Kiba answered, easily detecting that it was his female teammate who had spoken. "Now, let's do this!"

Meanwhile, just as Hinata had noted, Zabuza was a decent distance away from the group, observing the smokescreen. He had been wondering if his ears were playing tricks on him, but when he saw an army of shadow clones running towards him he realized that had heard correctly. _'So one of them knows that kinjutsu... kid or not, his reserves are impressive. Most jonin would fall dead from only ten or so clones.'_

The realization that Naruto knew a forbidden jutsu was exciting to Zabuza, but that feeling soon disappeared when the clones actually started fighting him. Their taijutsu was so pitiful that Zabuza couldn't help but shake his head.

"How did you even become a genin, brat? There's no way even a place like Konoha would actually graduate someone with such poor close-combat skills... if you can even call this a skill," he taunted, dodging and countering the kicks and punches that came his way with ease despite the nearby trees limiting his movements compared to the smaller chakra constructs.

"Shut up!" A few of the clones growled angrily, baring their teeth at the jonin as their wild attacks became even more chaotic. Whether that was from rage as their numbers dwindled or because of the obvious taunt, Zabuza wasn't sure.

Seeing Naruto's clones getting defeated so easily made the real humans of the party wary of approaching Zabuza. One of them, however, didn't need to get close to the man in order to be useful, and soon enough, a pair of kikaichu swarms started flying towards the assassin, intent on trapping him with a pincer attack.

Hearing the buzzing noises the bugs made as they flew, Zabuza started to scan the area around him as he fought with Naruto's various kage bunshin. Finding two clouds of bugs coming from his sides, the man scowled and backflipped away before they latched onto him. _'Dammit... they have an Aburame. I'm low on chakra as it is, if this kid gets a lucky shot then I'm done for. Well, there's my Demonic Shroud... but I better take this one out as soon as possible.'_

With that in mind, Zabuza stopped wasting his chakra to sustain the Kirigakure no Jutsu. He wouldn't need stealth just to kill a few genin.

As the mist that was floating around most of the nearby forest receded, Zabuza took a moment to examine his surroundings. In doing so, he saw one of the blond kids standing much farther back than the few clones that had yet to engage him in close quarters. The boy had his arms spread in front of him, and his stoic expression made Zabuza even more suspicious.

The swordsman immediately ran after the weird copy, moving fast enough that the other genin mistook it for a Body Flicker. Zabuza saw his target's blue eyes widen before he crashed his fist into the blond's gut, sending the boy to the ground and causing a plume of smoke to rise as a result of his transformation dispelling.

"Henging into someone isn't worth shit if you don't try to act like them," he lectured the prone Aburame, who was clutching his stomach and grunting from the pain. Not being done with Shino just yet, Zabuza planted his right foot on the boy's already wounded abdomen, pressing it against his ribcage with just enough strength to not crack anything.

"Let me show you a bit of what happens when you mess up in our world, boy."

With those words, Zabuza put more weight into on foot, grabbed Shino's wrists and _pulled_.

At that moment, Zabuza heard many screams. Most were cursing him in multiple ways, and he could also make out one begging him to stop and another calling the boy's name... but none were as enjoyable as the cries of pain coming from his newest victim. Normally, Zabuza would've just ripped his prey's arms, but leaving him to bleed out would kill him far too quickly, so the assassin settled for crushed wrists and dislocated shoulders for the time being.

"Now stay there and enjoy the show, if you can focus on that much. I'll let you join your teachers in hell later," Zabuza promised, walking back towards the group of shocked genin and dismissing the Aburame as a threat. The pain overload was far too big for Shino to be able to focus on commanding his bugs or even on speaking—which Zabuza knew and was counting on—but it didn't stop him from receiving information from his colony... not that Zabuza knew, or cared.

Facing the other genin, four of which were still disguised as Naruto and the thirty or so clones that were still standing, he groaned. "Pathetic. I just gave you all a perfect opportunity to attack, and all you maggots managed to do was waste time screaming in denial. You don't deserve to be called ninja!"

"Shut up!" One of the blonds yelled, pointing at the assassin. "I had to work my ass off to graduate, and I'm not gonna let you get away with this!"

Following that angered declaration, all of the clones in the area once more rushed at Zabuza. "Stop insisting on a strategy that didn't work the first time, you imbecile!" Not feeling like staying on the defensive any longer, Zabuza decided to put his kunai to good use and met the orange mob head-on. Though significantly slower than the illusory Itachi Uchiha, Naruto found his clones disappearing just as quickly when the Mist jonin started to tear through the clones as if they were made of paper.

Meanwhile, Hinata breathed a sigh of relief. The situation had been far from good, but at the very least Shino's arm was still connected to his body, even if loosely. Turning her focus back to Zabuza, she started to think of what to do next. Getting close to the Demon of the Hidden Mist seemed an impossibility to her, but even then, she knew that something needed to be done. _If I can hit him just once, we can still find a way out! Even a failure can still do a lot of damage with the Gentle Fist; I just need to wait for an opening first. But... but even then, do I really have a chance...?'_

Another of disguised genin, on the other hand, realized that the numeric advantage was not the only advantage they were losing. _'Dammit, at the rate this guy is killing the clones, we won't have any cover left to hide!'_

In a frantic hurry, that genin tried to look around to see if there wasn't a good ambush point or maybe even an escape route... but what caught his attention was another Naruto, one who had managed to evade Zabuza's mad rush and was standing only a few meters behind the man. That specific blond had a shaky grip on their kunai and seemed unsure to be about whether to attack Zabuza and risk a violent counterattack or if maybe helping the wounded Shino Aburame wouldn't be a better plan.

Terror, indecision and fear of death and the unknown were clearly painted on the face of that "Naruto"—an expression that the disguised genin recognized instantly from the previous day's events, before the Demon Brothers attacked their group. And it was at that moment that an idea came to him.

"Sasuke-kun, use your fire jutsu!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, looking straight at the blond that had sneaked behind the assassin.

Said blond just looked back at him, wearing a confused expression that was different from the one Naruto usually wore. _'Wait, what? Did that Naruto just say "Sasuke-kun" to me? But I'm the—Oh!'_

Zabuza tensed, and an instant later, he picked up a strong burning smell coming from somewhere behind him, as well as the noise of a blade piercing the air. Despite the shocking realization that one of the genin knew enough of elemental manipulation to infuse a weapon with fire chakra, Zabuza still managed to react and jump away, turning around in midair to face this prodigious genin...

 _'Fire Release: Grand Fireball Jutsu!'_

But the only thing that struck the place he was standing was a single kunai. Still in midair, Zabuza's eyes widened. _'What?! But that smell...!'_

That moment when Zabuza jumped was all that the genin that had shouted required to calculate the assassin's flight path and launch his fire attack where the enemy would be landing.

"Got you," Sasuke smirked confidently, a smug look that wasn't very fitting considering the person he was disguised as.

His smirk dropped once he felt a spike of killing intent coming from somewhere directly behind him and saw the log that was burning where Zabuza once stood.

"That was a clever little trick, boy... but you will need much more than that to hit a jonin." Without waiting for a reaction, the man violently kicked Sasuke between the legs, dispelling the henge and sending him to the ground in the same motion. He followed up by literally kicking the Uchiha while he was down, cracking more than a few ribs in the process and sending him flying straight into a tree. The impact it made against his skull was enough to knock him out for the remaining of the fight.

The boy's back ended up turned to Zabuza, and he couldn't help but notice the red and white fan symbol on the back of his shirt. _'The last Uchiha, huh? A pity; I can't let you live even though you impressed me.'_

"No! Sasuke-kun!" Sakura screamed, momentarily defenseless after having thrown her kunai at Zabuza. _'No... no! It's happening again!'_

Her sensei being killed, Naruto's clones being defeated in a flash, Sasuke being violently kicked into a tree, that incredible, overwhelming killing intent... similar memories of what had been but an illusion now were turning into a very brutal reality for Sakura.

 _'We're all going to die! This time, we're really going to die...!'_ The disguised girl's thought process halted when the world started to spin wildly.

For a while now she had been breathing incredibly fast—almost as fast as her heart was beating, which was a considerable feat. In a daze, she tried to support herself by leaning into a tree, but the dizziness made her miscalculate the distance and fall. A shout suspiciously similar to her name could be heard, but her foggy mind hadn't been able to discern who had called for her... and one second later, her body gave out on her and she passed out, her disguise faltering as she no longer was able to devote a portion of her chakra to maintaining it.

"Just a little killing intent was enough to knock her out. What a pathetic excuse for a kunoichi," Zabuza spat, disgusted, unknowingly angering Naruto even further.

"You will pay for that, you bastard! Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

Zabuza stared blankly at Naruto as the boy suddenly multiplied by eighty, and even though he could have stopped the technique with a simple kunai toss at the original Naruto, given the technique's slight start-up time, the assassin only groaned. "This again? Give up! That won't work!"

"We NEVER give up!" the clones chorused as they dashed to clash with Zabuza. Unlike before, all of them moved at once, but not every clone tried to assault Zabuza straight away, instead taking alternative paths between the nearby trees and bushes in order to surround the man.

"What?! You used the clones as a distraction to surround me?!" He looked around, making a show out of scanning the area for a way out, as if he were cornered. "Dammit... no, I won't let a mere genin defeat me!"

"Too bad, because that's exactly what will happen! Guys, Kiba! Let's go!" The Naruto clones then dived in all at once, confident in their ability to restrain the man long enough for the Inuzuka to land a finishing blow.

"Gotcha! Akamaru!"

Barking upon hearing his master's call, Akamaru jumped from the branch of a tree he had climbed (something only possible due to his current humanoid form), and twirled in midair to execute a Passing Fang towards the Narutos who were immobilizing Zabuza. At the same time, Kiba began a Passing Fang of his own and met Akamaru's right before they reached their target, who was trapped under a dome of orange clones...

The clones made seeing Zabuza an impossible task to the normal eye, but Hinata's Byakugan allowed her to see Zabuza beneath the clones. Her eyes widened when she noticed Zabuza focusing a good amount of what little chakra he still had.

"Naruto-kun, Kiba-kun! Don't do it!" she screamed, but it was too late.

"Urrraaagh!"

And following a mighty war cry, an explosion of a dark purple chakra blasted away the clones gathered around Zabuza, who was now enshrouded by that very same evil energy.

An awed, terrified Hinata couldn't help but feel as if a demon had appeared on the battlefield, covering Zabuza from head to toe in its foul blessing. And even though her Byakugan made the purple shroud appear just the same as any other source of chakra, the killing intent that Zabuza released was significantly stronger than before, leaving the girl trembling from fear just the same.

The clones, however, they weren't able to admire the wretched form Zabuza took, having been destroyed by the blast or by the subsequent impacts on the ground or trees. The original Naruto, incidentally, almost struck Kiba after being launched, and bounced off the grassy ground not too far from where Zabuza was. He fell right on his dominant arm, breaking the elbow and fracturing his forearm bone.

What didn't fail to hit the Inuzuka and his partner, though, was the flat of Zabuza's signature weapon, which the man had grabbed from his back as soon as the Narutos were repelled by the explosion of purple energy. Kubikiribocho was sturdy enough to be used as a shield, and it was more than strong enough to block the twin drills when coupled with a bit of the assassin's strength.

With their technique abruptly interrupted, Kiba was repelled downwards and crashed into the ground, Akamaru ricocheted off the metal blade and was sent skyward.

Not wasting a second, the jonin grabbed Akamaru by the leg and used him as a makeshift hammer, swinging him down at Kiba and leaving both unconscious after the collision. A big smoke cloud engulfed them as both reverted to their original forms.

Deactivating his shroud, Zabuza walked towards Naruto, who was struggling to get up thanks to the pain coming from his damaged limb. Zabuza ignored the only other "Naruto" who was still up, not seeing the point of bothering with an opponent that hadn't moved at all for a while and was probably too scared to try anything. He also was aware that the person underneath that disguise was a Hyuuga, and as such, he wasn't worried about what she could do to him without getting closer.

"Do you see it now, boy?" the assassin asked, strapping his sword to back once again as he stopped a mere feet away from Naruto.

"See what, your stupid face? I can't see it with that mask in the way, idiot! Ngh—!" Zabuza lifted him by the collar of his tracksuit and pressed the boy against a tree's trunk. Though surprised, the boy didn't lose the defiant expression, but Zabuza could see the fear reflected in his eyes, which could not be hidden by his mask of false bravado.

"I was talking about your weakness," the man clarified. "It doesn't matter how many of you come at me. Two, five, a dozen, a hundred—I'll kill them all, because you are _weak_."

"Shut up! I'm not w—hey, what are you doing?!" The boy demanded upon feeling Zabuza remove his headband with his free hand, noticing that it was surprisingly worn out already.

"You said you worked hard to earn this trash, didn't you?" He threw the headband on the ground. "Do you know how _I_ earned mine?"

Naruto's answer was to spit on Zabuza's face. The man tilted his head to the side to avoid that "attack" and returned the favor by using his fist to knock the air out of the boy's lungs.

"When I was your age, Kiri's exam was simple: kill one of your classmates or die trying. I killed the _whole_ class. But... you on the other hand, just had to show three E-rank ninjutsu to your teachers, didn't you?" Knowing that he boy didn't have enough oxygen in his lungs to answer, Zabuza didn't wait for a confirmation and simply stomped on what had once been Iruka's headband.

"Have you ever killed someone, brat? I doubt it. You never had to end someone's existence with your own hands; never had to bathe yourself in your enemy's blood as you wring the life out of their bodies! _You have no right to call yourself a shinobi, you stupid civilian_!"

With that said, Zabuza tossed the blond aside as if he were garbage. To his amusement, the boy still tried to get up and form the clone hand seal, but his broken bones made the process far too painful for him to bear it. "So you still have some fight in you, eh? I guess some worms only learn to stop squirming when they die."

"Bastard...! I won't die here! Not before I become Hokage!" At that point, Zabuza burst out laughing. Naruto wanted to throttle him, but he could only glare at the man as he cradled his wounded elbow. "Just who the hell do you think you are?!"

"Me? I am Zabuza Momochi, one of the seven swordsmen of the Mist, holder of the legendary Kubikiribocho, a war veteran, ex-captain of the Hidden Mist's Assassination Squad and future Godaime Mizukage! But more importantly..." he grinned beneath his mask, walking slowly towards the fallen Naruto.

"I am also the man who will kill you, just as easily as I've killed _thousands_ of people before you."

Watching that scene from behind Zabuza's back, Hinata reluctantly began to accept reality. There would be no openings to be found, and there was no time left to doubt her abilities, even if she knew that her chances of succeeding were almost zero. Though Zabuza had spared her friends thus far, she knew Naruto wouldn't be given the same courtesy. _'I have to something, and I have to do it now! Because if I don't...'_

Luckily, an idea came to her right away, and while the young Hyuuga went through a small combination of seals, Zabuza continued to calmly walk towards his prey. The man hardly felt threatened by the glare the blond was sending his way, as the boy's dominant arm was disabled. He did raise a hairless eyebrow, however, when Naruto's anger gave way to confusion just as he found himself standing two meters from the boy.

 _'What is this?'_ the blond wondered. _'It feels like something is tugging at me from the inside, but—whoa!'_

Naruto then felt a strong pulling sensation, and suddenly, he was in a completely different place on the battlefield, right behind Zabuza. In front of the man, he could also see "himself", and at that point in time, there was only one person that it could've been.

 _'Hinata?!'_

 _'Now!'_ Hinata declared to herself, springing herself towards an unsuspecting Zabuza. Through her Byakugan, she could see Naruto's lip starting to curl into a smile as he realized just what had happened. She could see her target still in shock as the supposedly wounded blond now was trying to attack him. She could even see Zabuza's heart pumping blood inside his body, oblivious to the surge of chakra that would soon make the organ stop moving.

And then she saw stars, when the man buried his knee on her skull and knocked her to the ground. Her transformation fell apart, revealing her true appearance and her newly acquired broken nose, from which blood was flowing freely. Her Byakugan receded, and the girl found herself unable to check if her skull had been fractured. From the pain, she doubted it was intact.

"Interesting... I thought that you had been smarter than the others and had simply decided to not even try to resist, but you were just looking for an opportunity to kill me, huh?" Zabuza's tone of detached curiosity was a clear contrast to the pained screams the girl let out when he stomped on her legs with more than enough power to break her ulna. "You've got an assassin's mind, little girl."

The pain had been too much for the untrained Hyuuga girl to maintain her dojutsu active, and her sight returned to normal. Had she been able to focus just for another second, she would have seen Naruto's smile vanishing completely.

"You know, I wasn't lying when I said I was going to spare one of you six. The Uchiha was the most impressive one, but I am not going to risk leaving a person with the Sharingan alive, so... congratulations. If you had been a little faster then I'd be dead right now, so you earned the right to live" He then turned around completely, now facing the real Naruto. "But you... I hope those extra seconds of life were enjoyable, because they will be your last."

Zabuza took a step forward before hearing a muffled, desperate cry. "No! P-please, don't! Let him go!"

Looking over his shoulder, he raised an eyebrow at the fallen girl, who had an arm outstretched towards him and another covering her bloody nose. "You should be happy that I am even sparing you to begin with. Say another word, and I might change my mind."

With that said, turned and started to move towards Naruto, glaring at the boy as he walked. "But there's no way I'm letting a trash that can't even repel someone's Kawarimi no Jutsu live—not when he still has the audacity to call himself a ninja."

Naruto frowned. How was he even supposed to know that it was possible to do a substitution with another person, let alone _block_ that kind of move? As far as he was aware, the academy had never mentioned anything about that. _'But then again, I DID miss a lot of classes,'_ he reminded himself. Sometimes pranking people had consequences... and luckily for Naruto, _someone_ was aware that he had missed that specific lesson.

"That's enough, Zabuza-san." All eyes turned to stare at Tazuna, who had decided to approach the group of shinobi. Surprisingly, he was moving normally and seemed rather calm for a civilian that was being exposed to a jonin's killer intent.

"Ah, the bridge builder knows my name, what an honor!"

"Those kids are not any threat to you," the old man continued, ignoring the sarcastic remark. "So just leave them be and take me to Gatou already."

Zabuza stared at him blankly. "What? Take you to Gatou...? Ah, indeed. I almost forgot that the rich bastard wanted you alive, if possible," he shrugged. _'Odd. My memory is better than this...'_

"Old man, what are you doing?!"

"…Take care of your team, Naruto," Tazuna answered, looking at Naruto stoically.

Before the boy had a chance to reply, Zabuza came to a decision. "...Fine. I won't send the brats to hell, but you are coming with me instead." Giving one last glare to Naruto, the assassin started walking away. Without any threats nearby, Zabuza felt free to lower his guard, paying just enough attention to his surroundings so that he would be able to hear Tazuna's footsteps behind him...

The footsteps never came.

"If I have to tie you up, I will," Zabuza warned as he began to turn around. His brain only registered the fact that a massive fist of stone was coming his way at the moment it crashed into his chest, sending the man spiraling through the air until his body was stopped by a nearby tree trunk.

Hinata stared at the old man incredulously, pale lavender eyes wide as she realized who was standing in front of her.

"Whoa, when did you learn that jutsu, old man? You could have done that earlier, y'know?!" Instead of answering Naruto, Tazuna started running towards the prone Zabuza.

"That's not Tazuna-san, Naruto." At the sound of a disappointed, tired voice coming from somewhere behind him, Naruto did his best to turn around. When he did so, he saw an exhausted-looking Kakashi, who was walking in his direction. "Look underneath the underneath like I taught you to and I'm sure you will get it."

"Kaka—ugh!" Naruto grunted in pain, as he tried to rise but failed due to his injuries. "Kakashi-sensei! You're alive...!"

"...Sorry for being late," Kakashi apologized in a soft voice, ruffling the boy's messy hair with his right hand (which no longer was bloodied), much to Naruto's annoyance. "But now that I'm here, I will make sure Zabuza will regret the day he decided to harm my students."

Leaving the group of genin alone after constating that they would be fine for the time being, Kakashi ran as fast as he could to support Kurenai as she clashed with Zabuza. Unfortunately for the woman, her attack had sent the man into an area where the trees weren't as clustered together, giving the swordsman ample room to properly use the Kubikiribocho. This resulted in the man landing a hit on her shoulder, ruining her henge.

"How the hell are you not dead?!" Zabuza growled furiously after swinging at Kurenai's side and only striking air. The woman decided to capitalize on his mistake and tried to close the gap between them, but she lost the opportunity when Zabuza attempted to kick her, forcing her to block the blow instead. "The jutsu I used was too wide for you two to avoid it; too strong to be blocked!"

"Instead of thinking about how we escaped, you should be worried about how you are going to die," Kurenai replied evenly, grabbing ahold of Zabuza's blade after he overcommitted during an overhead swing.

The sound of multiple kunai piercing the air was heard, but even though Zabuza knew they were coming, Kurenai's grip on his sword was too strong for him to jump away with it. The decision to forfeit his sword and keep his life was made one second too late, and Zabuza's arms and legs were pierced by the throwing knives, courtesy of Kakashi. The blades buried deep into his body, forcing him to fall to the ground from the sheer force of the impact, leaving the man on the ground as his wounds started to bleed.

"You got careless, Zabuza. Did you really think that I would allow you to kill my students on my watch?" The swordsman grunted as he raised his head to face Kakashi, who was calmly walking towards him. Though his tone was calm, there was an undercurrent of anger that was unmistakable.

That, however, wasn't what had caught Zabuza's attention.

 _'His Sharingan! The pattern... it has changed?!'_

Kurenai found Zabuza's shock amusing. "Got anything to say before we exorcise you, Demon of the Hidden Mist?"

It was at that moment that the swordsman saw something interesting happen on one of the trees right in front of him.

Zabuza was thankful that his mouth was covered by bandages. He wasn't sure if he would be able to hide his smirk after seeing a certain someone appear on a nearby tree's branch, hidden from the other ninja.

Making an effort to send a piercing glare towards the person, he said his supposed last words. "My only regret... is dying by the hands of a traitor."

That sentence left both jonin completely confused... until two senbon violently struck the right side of Zabuza's neck, splattering blood on the impact and downing Zabuza instantly. Kurenai and Kakashi quickly turned to see the who stole their kill, only to come face-to-face with a hunter-nin from the Hidden Mist, if the emblem on their white mask was of any indication.

The mysterious ninja turned slightly, scanning the area where the genin were forced to fight someone much above their skill level. "My apologies, Konoha shinobi. If I had been faster in locating Zabuza, your students wouldn't have needed to suffer like this."

"It would be hypocritical of us to be angered about that," Kurenai said, still on guard as Kakashi crouched to examine Zabuza's corpse.

"...He's dead. There's no heartbeat, and he's not breathing either," the silver-haired man concluded.

As the site of Zabuza's final stand was not far from where he fought the genin, those that weren't unconscious were able to hear the whole exchange.

"It's over..." Hinata whispered to herself, the relief she felt from knowing that there was no longer any danger temporarily making her forget the pain blazing through her legs. Her gaze flicked to the only other of her ex-classmates that she knew was still up, and saw Naruto looking straight at the fallen form of Zabuza, disbelief plastered all over his face and reflected clearly on his ocean blue eyes.

 _'Dead...? He's dead?!'_

The same Zabuza that slaughtered an entire class of academy students just to earn his headband, who had become the most skilled assassin of the Hidden Mist and one of its most renowned swordsmen; who had effortlessly dispatched Naruto, his teammates and over a hundred of shadow clones as if they were mere _toys_ that he had been playing with, only able to move around because he had wanted to be entertained by their foolish attempts to defeat him _..._ now reduced to a motionless pile of flesh and bones, propped up against a tree. A corpse. Dead.

The responsible? Neither Kakashi nor Kurenai, but an unknown masked person that had appeared at the last minute, ending the fight just with just a couple of long, metallic needles.

Naruto found himself simply unable to process that information.

 _'This guy... he can't be much older than me!'_ Naruto realized, eyes now focused on the rather short hunter-nin. The mysterious ninja wore a green haori over simple brown clothes, and there was a red wave-like pattern on his mask, passing right through where the mouth was supposed to be. As the ninja used a body flicker to land near Zabuza, Naruto absentmindedly wondered how the hunter-nin would look like without the metallic hair cuffs and the bun that restrained his black hair.

"Now if you will excuse me, I must dispose of the body and deliver his head and sword to my village," the masked newcomer said, in an even voice that wasn't deep enough for it to belong to an adult, confirming Naruto's theory.

Without another word, he sealed the Kubikiribocho on a scroll and grabbed Zabuza's body. One second later, and the only evidence of the duo's presence was the flurry of leaves that remained after the hunter-nin used the Shunshin no Jutsu.

Silence reigned over the forest, but only for a few instants.

"Oi! Is... is it safe to come over there now?!" Tazuna shouted from behind a tree, some distance away from the ninja.

"Indeed." To everyone's surprise, it was Shino who answered him, not saying any more than the absolute necessary lest his voice become affected by the pain.

"Wow, you are awake?" Naruto questioned, sure that the Aburame had been knocked out by Zabuza. Shino was, in fact, still lying down on the grass, in the same place where Zabuza blitzed him.

"Shino might be, but half of you aren't," Kurenai piped in, approaching the genin before Shino had the chance to answer Naruto. "Can someone explain to me what happened?"

As the trio shared what they could of their encounter with the Demon of the Hidden Mist, Kurenai and Kakashi moved around the clearing, checking on their teams. Naruto had his elbow partially healed in the process, but with the sole exception of Hinata's nose and a nasty gash on the back of Sasuke's head, the other wounds the genin suffered couldn't be fully healed right away. Still, Kurenai did treat what she could to lessen the pain her genin were suffering so that they could last until she was able to heal them correctly (and much to Shino's relief, she also carefully helped him to get up).

"I see. And... how was Sakura knocked out?" Kakashi inquired nonchalantly, masking his weariness, confusion and worry perfectly as he stared at the only female genin under his direct command. Naruto, Hinata and Shino had focused on Zabuza's movements, but none of them mentioned how Sakura had been defeated.

"She... kinda just freaked out all of a sudden and passed out," Naruto answered, shrugging and then wincing as his elbow protested against the motion. The pain wasn't actually strong, but it had caught him off-guard.

Glancing worryingly at his pink-haired teammate, Naruto wondered if she had truly had passed out because of killer intent like Zabuza said, of it had been something else.

"...I was not able to watch the fight from my position," Shino said, "but my kikai detected her falling unconscious mere seconds after Sasuke was kicked into a tree."

As she was currently busy using a diagnosis jutsu on Akamaru, no one saw Kurenai pale as she connected the dots.

"...None of them have any physical injuries that I can't heal," she stated after a pause to regain her composure. _'But can the same be said about injuries that aren't of a physical nature?'_ Kurenai wasn't sure, but she now knew that she needed to do something to minimize the damage she had caused to the pink-haired girl.

"Kakashi-sensei!"

Hearing Naruto's worried, startled cry, Kurenai drew a kunai and turned around just in time to see Naruto and Tazuna trying to support Kakashi's limp body.

"Oof, this guy is heavier than he looks!" Tazuna commented, struggling to keep the jonin on his feet with what little help Naruto could spare him. Trained ninja or not, it wasn't easy to carry a muscular adult male that walked around with a heavy flak jacket. "What's wrong with him?!"

Kurenai winced slightly. "He's suffering from severe chakra exhaustion. For now, just lower him to the ground gently."

As Tazuna and Naruto followed Kurenai's order, Hinata shifted her head to look at the woman."Isn't this what happened to me two days ago, sensei?"

"In theory," Kurenai agreed, "but in Kakashi's case, the recoil will be much stronger." As much as it boggled her mind, Hinata seemed to have dipped only a bit below the levels of chakra her body needed to work when she fainted during the modified bell test. Kakashi, however, had gone much farther. The technique he used to counter Zabuza's attack required significant amounts of chakra, but he still had managed to stay conscious due to sheer willpower.

 _'You couldn't rest until knowing they were fine, could you, Kakashi...?'_ the woman thought, sighing. Though she had expected this would have happened at any minute, it just made things more complicated for everyone.

"So... what are we going to do now?" Naruto asked, frowning as he realized that he was the only member of Team 7 that was still awake. He had hoped that Kakashi would be able to carry two of their unconscious allies while himself, Kurenai and Tazuna transported the other three (or four, if one counted the small Akamaru)... but Kakashi fainting threw a wrench in his plans.

"I guess we will have to camp out here," Tazuna shrugged. "A damn pity. My house is just a couple hours away... but well..."

"That may not be necessary, Tazuna-san," Shino spoke up. "I believe we can still arrive there today despite more than half of our group being unable to move perfectly..."

Shino then shared his plan with the group: Naruto would create three clones for each individual that incapable of walking on their own. One of each trio of clones would use the Transformation Jutsu and take the shape of a stretcher, and the others would transport them. Shino had even been offered a lift as well, but he refused, arguing that his wounds didn't hinder his movements.

Since Naruto hadn't wasted a whole lot of his clearly massive reserves and insisted that he was not hurting badly enough for the whole ordeal to be a problem, Kurenai agreed to the plan immediately. It only took a little less than ten minutes for the group to be ready to move out, mostly because Kurenai and Tazuna were extra careful when carrying the three people who were actually wounded.

Hinata had been the last one to be moved into the bright orange stretcher, and once the adults were done with that, the Naruto that was on the front side of the stretcher turned his head to face the Hyuuga. "You comfortable back there, Hinata?"

"Uh, y-yes! V-very much!" She retorted quickly, waving her hands in front of her dismissively to finish the conversation quickly. She did not want to face Naruto after failing to help during their fight; not when he had been so active during the entire ordeal. In her haste, she didn't notice that her efforts were completely pointless, as there would be a Naruto behind her anyways. "T-thanks for carrying me, clone-kun."

"Clone? Why would you think that?" Naruto looked confused for a second before breaking into a grin. "I'm the real deal, y'know!"

"Oh, I... uh... didn't think you'd bother with me yourself..." she mumbled in a barely audible tone, looking away from the blond's inquisitive gaze. _'Surely, this is nothing more than a coincidence...'_

"…?" Naruto hadn't understood a word. Looking at the clone that was carrying Hinata from behind, the copy shrugged... an action that the original soon mimicked (as best as he could).

Had he actually heard her mumblings, Naruto would have shared with the bluenette that the least he could have done for her after she saved him from Zabuza was to make sure she wouldn't fall to the ground during the rest of their journey by carrying her himself, but sadly, that conversation never happened. Instead, Naruto decided to ask one thing that had him concerned about the next part of their adventure.

"Hey, Kurenai-sensei? How are we going to find our way back?" the original blonde asked, scanning his surroundings. Kiba had been taking care of that little issue before, but without the Inuzuka's sense of smell, Naruto had no idea how they were supposed to get back on the road. All he could see was grass, trees, and bushes—regardless of what direction he was facing. It was disorientating, to say the least.

"Oh? Shino can take care of that easily... in fact," she approached her student, "I believe I still need to thank you for helping us locate you all."

"It was the least I could do, given the circumstances. We were fortunate that Zabuza truly believed he had killed you, otherwise he wouldn't have lifted the mist and my abilities would have remained impaired."

Naruto decided that the woman's answer did little to enlighten him. "I don't get it."

"Allow me to elaborate," Shino said, contorting his nose in an attempt to re-adjust his sunglasses. "Zabuza had initially waited to ambush us on an area bordering the road we would traverse. With that in mind, I had sent some of my kikai to scout his surroundings, in case he had a partner. These specific bugs remained put after he activated the Kirigakure no jutsu, and even though quite a few of them were killed during the battle, there were still enough of them for me to use to guide Kurenai-sensei towards us. I did not make use of all bugs I had sent, so I should be able to direct us towards the location where our sensei fought Zabuza."

 _'Well, that was lengthy,'_ Naruto deadpanned internally.

"Um... were you awake this entire time, Shino-kun?"

"Indeed, Hinata. Thanks to the pain, I found myself unable to manipulate enough bugs to attack our enemy, so I tried to make myself useful in another manner. Considering that I detected that Kakashi-sensei's chakra reserves were close to complete depletion, I believed that leading them to us would be the best use of my abilities, but it required me to completely focus on the task at hand."

"And it was a good choice. If it was not for your bugs, I don't think I would have been able to stop Kakashi from summoning a dog to track you down," Kurenai admitted, glancing worriedly at her fellow jonin. That kind of technique would have killed him thanks to the chakra drain. _'But if the alternative was letting Team 7 crumble again, then you'd gladly choose death, wouldn't you...?'_

"Well," Tazuna began, "if everyone's ready to go, then let's hurry up and get out here. This damn forest gives me the creeps."

Looking back at the bridge builder, Kurenai nodded. "Of course. We need to reach your house as fast as possible so that I can bring my teams back to a fighting condition. I don't think anyone will attack us today, for the same reasons as yesterday, but you can never be too cautious."

"Heh, don't worry!" Naruto piped in. "If anyone tries to attack us, I'll show them that Naruto Uzumaki is not to be messed with!"

Oblivious to the way his words inspired the discouraged girl he was helping carry, Naruto glanced back at the spot where Zabuza was killed.

 _'Next time... I swear that I'm not going to lose, no matter what!'_

* * *

While what remained of Teams 7 and 8 made their way towards their client's home, a certain masked ninja was heading the opposite way, jumping from tree branch to tree branch until he eventually found a small clearing suitable for his purposes.

"I think this is far enough..."

Landing on the grass, the masked ninja carefully laid Zabuza on the ground and grabbed a pouch from a hidden pocket stitched on the inside of his haori. Placing it beside Zabuza's unmoving body, the mysterious ninja looked over the various tools that were inside the pouch, searching for one in particular. "First, I need to cut those bandages to drain the blood..."

But before the masked boy could even get the tool he needed to remove Zabuza's mask, the man woke up. "I can handle this myself," he spat, sitting upright.

His eyes were wide and bloodshot, and they only got wider when the man forcefully removed the two senbon that had pierced his neck. "Dammit Haku, you are brutal...! Did you really have to shoot me through the neck of all things?"

Haku glared at his master through the mask, making full use of the fact that it didn't let Zabuza see his expression. "Zabuza-sama, it's dangerous to remove senbon that were stuck in such a sensitive spot. If you tear a blood vessel, then you'd make me saving you a waste of time."

The swordsman spat blood on the ground while glaring at the boy. "Take off that stupid mask already." As if being reminded of his defeat and near death wasn't enough to ruin his day, the sight of the hunter-nin mask that Haku wore was only contributing to Zabuza's foul mood.

The boy sighed behind his mask. "To answer your question, yes, I did. The neck is a vulnerable area because it isn't very muscular or protected by bones. In other words, my needles go straight into the pressure points I aim for, but they would be met with quite a bit of resistance if I had tried to strike elsewhere." Obediently, Haku removed his mask, allowing Zabuza's brown eyes to see his similarly colored orbs.

"Regardless, sister would have my head on an ice platter if your "perfect body" were to be ruined by my hands. And we already know she won't be too happy about you almost getting yourself killed," the boy mentioned off-handedly, his expression stoic if not for the slight curl in the corner of his lips. "You won't be able to move well for a week, if not more."

"Bah... Haru worries too much." Zabuza tried to rise to his feet, only to see that Haku was telling the truth. Sitting up like he had done when he regained consciousness was a hard task, but manageable. But trying to get up? That was simply too painful, even for him. "And don't talk as if she wasn't going to give you hell too."

Haku did his best to suppress a shudder. "Yes... and my apologies, Zabuza-sama. Had I been faster, you—"

"Quiet," the man cut him off. "Helping me against those Leaf bastards wasn't the mission I gave you. Besides, I'm actually surprised you managed to return today, since you left just a few hours ago... that damn midget has some quality boats, I'll give him that."

Hearing that his master wasn't mad at him made Haku sigh, relieved. The boy stiffened, however, when he realized that explaining that to his sister wouldn't do him any good.

"Report," Zabuza barked, unhappy that his tool became too distracted to follow the indirect order.

"After leaving the ship our employer let us borrow, I followed the main road that connects Konoha to the closest port town, as you suggested, and I found signs of combat on part of that road," the fake hunter-nin said, once again digging into a hidden pocket to bring out another pouch. This one he emptied on the ground, leaving its contents to fall freely between himself and Zabuza. "In addition to marks of kunai, shuriken and fuuma shuriken on the ground and in a log on the side of the road, there was also the shell of a smoke bomb, some ninja wire and these two materials that are part of the weapons the Demon Brothers use."

Zabuza eyed the objects warily. He recognizes a broken pair of metal rings that were part of the inner mechanism of Gouzu and Meizu's gauntlets, and most worryingly, shards of their older brother's claws.

"There was no blood on the road or anywhere nearby, but part of the ground was burned. That was all I could find out, Zabuza-sama," Haku finished with a small bow.

"Tsk. Looks like the ones that took care of them were the genin, then," Zabuza constated, shaking his head. "Idiots... they were probably restrained and left for Konoha's ANBU to take them to prison."

"Uh, the genin Zabuza-sama? Were they really strong enough to deal with three chunin?" Haku questioned, tilting his head slightly.

"The jonin might have stepped in at some point, but the stuff you found suggest an actual fight. They have an Aburame, and Inuzuka and a Hyuuga with them, and there's an annoying blond brat that can spam shadow clones to an absurd degree," Zabuza explained. "With these kinds of support skills, they probably detected the ambush ahead of time, like what happened with mine... except that Kakashi and Kurenai wouldn't have any problems in taking out the Demon Brothers. You'd never have found anything in that case, so the genin definitively were part of the fight."

Haku's eyes narrowed. "This complicates our situation, doesn't it?"

"Hmm... yes and no," Zabuza answered, not fully sure of what point his apprentice had been focusing on. "These brats can foil any surprise attack we could attempt, but their mission is to protect the bridge builder. They will have no choice but to deal with us if we bring the fight to the bridge itself. But our plans to invade Kirigakure will need to be adjusted." As disposable as he found the Demon Brothers to be, they were indeed trained to fight under the heavy mist of Zabuza's favorite jutsu, ans such, they would have been significant assets when Zabuza decided that it was time for his rematch with the Mizukage.

"We will need to gather more money before returning to the Mist, then?"

The swordsman nodded. "Exactly. Since Gatou's intel was wrong, I was planning to grab more money from him to compensate... but with things as they are, there's no way he will accept my terms." Zabuza knew that the tycoon wouldn't be pleased to know that Tazuna would stay alive for roughly another week, even if there was a good reason to justify for his defeat at the hands of Kakashi and Kurenai.

Seeing his tool's expression darken considerably, Zabuza frowned. "Be patient. I will kill Yagura and end those bloodline purges once and for all, just not in the near future."

Adopting a stoic mask, Haku stared at his master. His words were a clear indicator that the man still didn't want to use his strongest tool against the Sanbi jinchuriki—the man that was responsible for his clan's destruction. Zabuza stared right back at him, silently reminding that his desire to personally avenge the Yuki clan would need to be forgotten. He simply wasn't strong enough to help during that battle.

"Well, if that was all, then please lie down and let me look at your wounds," Haku asked with forced politeness, eyeing the few kunai wounds that his master had. There was not a whole lot of blood trickling out of them, but he knew that once the daggers were removed the situation would change.

"Just take me to the hideout already. I don't have time to waste here."

Haku nearly rolled his eyes after hearing that, but settled for just raising one eyebrow at the older man. "And let sister see you with those kunai ruining sticking out of your bleeding limbs? Are you sure you want to do that, Zabuza-sama?"

The jonin groaned, but conceded the point and did as he had been told to. "Your sister is a great tool, but not a perfect one."

The younger ninja nodded, stealthily sighing as he searched for the tools he would need. He had long since become used to Zabuza considering them as nothing more than living weapons, but unlike his sister, he had never liked to be referred as such. It had been ages since the use of the word "tool" had bothered him, but after so many years of fighting side-by-side with Zabuza, he sometimes forgot how little he actually mattered to the man. _'Just like those bunnies he brings with him for substitutions... nothing more a tool to be used and disposed of as he sees fit.'_

"This will hurt quite a bit, Zabuza-sama," the boy warned, erasing his previous thoughts from his mind. "Do you wish for me to knock you out while I take care of your wounds?"

"My pain threshold is high," Zabuza replied dismissively, scoffing at the thought. It wasn't just pride, however, that kept him from accepting the pseudo-anesthesia Haku had offered him. Zabuza was planning to put this next minutes—and the whole period of rest he would be forced to take—to form a suitable strategy so that his next fight against the Copy Ninja and the Genjutsu Mistress would end differently.

 _'The Sharingan... that's going to be the biggest problem. I need to find a way to get around that stupid dojutsu, or else they will truly kill me this time. Though if I can split them up permanently, I think I can deal with that nuisance by myself.'_

His train of thought was halted abruptly when Haku started to remove one of the kunai that had struck his left arm. The process hurt more than he expected, but compared to the pain he would bring to the Leaf ninja the next time they met...

It was nothing.

* * *

"Ah...! Man, this nap _rocked_. Was almost as good as ramen..." Naruto mumbled to himself, stretching lazily and letting out a huge yawn, all while still lying comfortably on the couch of Tazuna's living room. "Almost."

On the back of his mind, he realized that almost two hours of rest completely got rid of the dull throb on his arm (which had worsened over time thanks to the strain caused by carrying Hinata), but that thought was quickly forgotten as his nose detected a delicious smell coming from somewhere nearby. That, coupled with his stomach rumbling, convinced the boy that an investigation was in order.

Even though the visibility was low due to the curtains on the windows, Naruto didn't have any troubles in following that smell thought the darkened room until he was faced with a closed door. Tazuna's house had wide rooms, but there wasn't a whole lot of furniture around for him to worry about breaking something.

Opening the door slightly, he peeked into what he discovered to be the kitchen and saw Tsunami, Tazuna's daughter. The woman was dressed in simple clothes: a gray skirt that ended below the knee, and a pink shirt with red sleeves and collar. As she was currently busy finishing lunch, her long, black hair was tied in a low ponytail instead of flowing freely like she seemed to prefer.

The jinchuuriki became distracted in his attempt to identify what was being cooked just by the smell, and ended up leaning against the door, making it creak noisily and unintentionally announcing his presence to Tsunami.

"Oh! Hey there," she said, offering him a friendly smile as she turned around. "I was going to let you rest for a while longer, but I guess that making lunch made too much noise for you to keep sleeping, huh?"

"Nah, I woke up on my own," Naruto replied. _'Well, I think.'_

"Well, at least you won't have to wait much more, because lunch is almost ready," she said, glancing at a nearby clock on the wall.

"Hmm, lunch! I'm starving!" Patting his belly in anticipation, the boy immediately set out to sit on one of the chairs surrounding the kitchen's table. "But hey, if it's almost time to eat, then where are the others?"

"Well... I wasn't expecting so many people, so I asked father to buy more food on the market. He brought some stuff with him from Konoha, but with almost a dozen mouths to feed, it simply won't be enough." She turned around again to face the stove and the pots she had been working with. "Your sensei and that boy with the sunglasses offered to accompany him, so it will be just us for now. They should be here at any minute, though."

"Oh... okay." Despite his reply, he didn't like the idea of sitting around without a capable jonin nearby, even if Kurenai had placed a special genjutsu to deal with any trespassers that might have bypassed Shino's scouts... but if there was one thing he liked even less, it was being hungry. "So, what about that food you were talking about...?"

Tsunami giggled. "Sorry, this will take about fifteen or so minutes to get done. But... I do have last night's dinner in the freezer if you want to eat right now. I forgot my son was going to be camping until tomorrow, so I made too much for just myself," she commented, laughing at her own carelessness.

At first, Naruto was going to refuse. Though dealing with the smell of food for such a long time would have been maddening, waiting so that he wouldn't eat by himself would be worth it. However, his stomach objected to that idea rather loudly, making Tsunami giggle at his expense once again.

"I'll prepare it for you, just give me a couple minutes, ok?"

Roughly five minutes later and a bowl of food and a pair of chopsticks were placed right in front of Naruto. "Uh... what is this?" Naruto could recognize the rice, fish, and fried eggs rather easily, but there were a few seed-like things in a dark brow liquid that were beyond his comprehension.

"Ah, those are black beans! They are really popular here in Wave, and they go well with rice."

Shrugging, Naruto went right ahead and split his chopsticks. "Itadakimasu!"

Soon, the boy came to two conclusions. First, that the people in Wave didn't have good taste for food. The second was that he really should have waited to eat with everyone; his nose was telling him that what Tsunami was cooking would have been worth waiting for. However, even though his manners left a fair bit to be desired, he knew better than to complain or show his dislike for the food.

Or rather, for the black beans. The other parts of the dish had been great, but unlike what he sometimes did when he was forced to eat vegetables, he couldn't use the fish or the egg to compensate for the taste of the beans—the taste was simply too strong for that to work. His struggle to eat the whole bowl slowed his consumption pace considerably, and he was just about to finish it when he suddenly heard Tazuna's voice.

"I'm home!"

Seconds later, the old man entered the kitchen, with Kurenai and Shino trailing behind him. The two adults held heavy bags full of food, while Shino was carrying just a pair of small plastic bags. Though his limbs were now functional, Naruto was sure that the Aburame couldn't handle a lot of strain just yet.

"Welcome home!"

Naruto made sure to give his full attention to the food while Tsunami greeted her father.

"Oh? Eating already, brat?" Tazuna questioned, placing his bags in an unoccupied corner of the kitchen. "Couldn't wait for us, eh?"

Naruto shot an annoyed glance at Tazuna. "Not my fault you guys took too long to get back here, old man."

Upon hearing the rude reply the blond gave, one of Shino's brown eyebrows twitched in annoyance. "Naruto, let me remind you that we are guests here. It is not polite to speak to your host in such a disrespectful manner."

Though Shino's advice was sound (and ignored), Tsunami waved him off dismissively. "Don't worry about that, kids. My father is only here because of your efforts, so there's no need to be all formal with us! Especially not now that the food is ready," she said, hoping that lunch would be a lively affair, for once.

Finally finishing the last bits of his bowl, Naruto couldn't help but snicker a bit to himself. He hadn't interacted with the serious Aburame that much, but he doubted the guy would ever be able to act casually.

"Did any of the others wake up?" Kurenai questioned, sitting down on a chair opposite to Naruto.

"I'm afraid all of them are still asleep, Kurenai-san," Tsunami answered solemnly as she placed two bowls of food in front of the jonin. She had been in a happy mood ever since her father returned, but her happiness faltered when she remembered five wounded ninja that risked their lives to ensure that Tazuna would return home safe and sound.

"I hope they are ok..." Naruto mumbled to himself as he got up to leave his own bowl in the kitchen sink. As he did so, he noticed that even though Tsunami was placing bowls and pots with different foods on the table, there was a slightly larger bowl with a bit of everything, sitting by itself in a corner of the sink.

"Say, what's up with this one?" he asked, turning to face Tsunami.

"That? I made it for the girl that can't walk. I was planning to bring it to her since she can't come down here. I didn't know what she liked, so I made sure to give her plenty of options." Eyeing what was supposed to be Hinata's lunch, Naruto involuntarily licked his lips. It looked and smelled delicious. "It's a pity she can't come here to eat with us," the woman continued, unknowingly giving an idea to Naruto as she grabbed the bowl.

"Y'know what, give that to me. I'll bring that to her, so go talk with your dad! I'm sure you are dying to catch up with him!" he suggested, sporting a wide smile that was soon mirrored by the older woman. He knew that father and daughter had barely been able to speak with each other ever since they arrived, and as much as he was envious of them, he hoped that they would enjoy the reunion.

"Oh, how nice of you! Thank you!" The woman said, passing the bowl and a pair of chopsticks to the whiskered boy. "And I'm sure the poor thing will appreciate the company. Your friend must have been lonely."

"Yeah. Stuck in that bed all by herself, she must be bored to tears by now," Tazuna commented, munching happily on a piece of beef. "It's been, what, two hours since we arrived?"

"About that much," Kurenai confirmed. "But actually, Hinata asked me to retrieve a book from her backpack before we went to buy food, so I'm sure she has been busy." Naruto raised an eyebrow at the jonin, not seeing how what she said was meant to counter Tazuna's statement.

Not too soon afterwards, the orange-clad boy found himself walking up the stairs of Tazuna's house. He still felt a little surprised by how big it was. There were two guest rooms downstairs, one of which Kakashi had been using and the other would be shared by all male genin (and for the sake of convenience, Sakura had been put there as well, which is why Naruto had been forced to use the sofa). On the second floor, Tsunami, Tazuna and his grandson each had their own rooms, with the former's room also being lent to the three kunoichi of their group. The biggest surprise, he would say, was that there were enough extra futons for everybody; he was sure that some of the sleeping bags would have been needed.

Still, what held Naruto's thoughts at that moment were the last words Tsunami had said to him before he left.

Naruto was pretty sure that, to a degree, he could already safely classify Kiba as a friend despite his aggressive tendencies. Shino hadn't opened up to him just yet, but he was fine with the Aburame as long as he didn't talk for too long. Lastly, his own teammates were a bit of a problem, and yet both of them seemed to be making an effort to become his friends. But Hinata...?

Now that Mizuki had revealed to him the reason why the village hates him so much, and since he had given up on discovering who his parents were a long time ago... he could safely classify Hinata Hyuuga as the biggest puzzle he had ever tried to solve. Naruto simply couldn't make heads or tails about the blue-haired girl; she was a complete enigma to him.

And this led him to wonder: Was she a friend?

There was some evidence to support that theory. Anyone cool enough to give him food for free was nice in his book, and she did use the "kun" honorific in the few moments she had been able to talk to him... but the way Hinata randomly became hesitant to be around him, if not _scared_ of him, made Naruto suspicious.

At first, he shrugged it off, believing Kiba's words about her simply being a weird person. It was a reasonable train of thought... but while he had not been surprised that she was fine with her own teammates and even with Sakura, he had seen her talking freely with _Sasuke Uchiha_ of all people during the previous day's dinner. That was more than enough to prove to Naruto that Hinata had an issue with him specifically, likely related to why she was reluctant to pair up with him to fight one of the Demon Brothers.

What mystified him the most, surprisingly, was the way she fought. Naruto didn't think much of her behavior during his sparring match with her outside of being surprised by how aggressive she was being right off the bat. Watching her next bouts against his own teammates, though, made him notice that she wasn't fighting them in the same way.

There was a lack of purpose in the way she fought them... a purpose that he saw shining brightly on her (at the time) blue eyes when she charged at Zabuza in the one moment she believed she had a chance to land a killing blow on the assassin. Thinking back on his own fight against the Hyuuga, he could remember that same fire burning on her pale lavender orbs... did that mean she actually hated him?

 _'No... that can't be right,'_ he thought. Her plea for Zabuza to spare him made no sense if she hated him. As far as his experience went, those two things went hand-in-hand. Was she actually scared of him for some reason? Maybe he had pranked her in the past and had forgotten about it...?

Or perhaps she had some kind of illness that affected her mood? That would certainly explain why her face became redder than a tomato whenever they interacted. _'That shade of red definitely isn't healthy,'_ he observed.

Unfortunately, before he was able to figure anything out, he was already in front of the door to Tsunami's bedroom. Hearing the sharp noise of a page being turned was all that he needed to know that Hinata wasn't sleeping.

"Well, here goes nothing," he mumbled to himself as he turned the knob.

Much like when he entered the kitchen, the door made a loud creaking noise as it allowed him to enter the room, but Naruto's loud voice made that sound go by unheard. "Hey, Hinata! I've got your lunch!"

Hinata had been silently reading her book while enjoying the comfort of Tsunami's bed, but when she met his eyes the girl gasped, almost jumping from sheer surprise.

"N-N-Naruto-kun?! W-what—ah!"

In a hasty attempt to hide her book behind her pillow, Hinata clumsily dropped it, making the book bounce on the mattress once before hitting the floor, closing itself in the process.

Both kids stared at the fallen book for a couple seconds before making eye-contact.

"…"

"…"

"…"

The two remained in an awkward pause for all of three seconds before it was broken when Hinata's stomach loudly protested against the idea of Naruto keeping "their" lunch for himself. The gurgling noise resounded through the room, and despite the organ's best efforts, the silence between the two remained.

That is, until Naruto broke out laughing, furthering Hinata's desire to wither and die on that very spot.

"Hahahahah... man, who knew you could be this loud?" he commented jovially, focusing just enough to not drop or spill the food he held in his hands. It was amusing to him that, for once, it hadn't been hard to understand or hear what the girl wanted to "tell" him.

"I'm sorry..." she mumbled, face burning a bright red from shame. Not that Naruto could see her expression at all, as she lowered her head to stare at her lap almost immediately.

Naruto stopped laughing, his mood switching from amused to bemused. This time, he had heard her clearly. "Dude, why are you sorry?"

The girl didn't answer nor did she look at him, afraid to meet the blond's (in her mind) judging gaze. Naruto understood from the way she fidgeted that if he didn't do anything, they would go back to square one: silence.

"Well, if that noise was anything to go by then I'm sure you're hungry, so... here it is!" the blond exclaimed as he approached the bed, halting when Hinata thrust her arm towards him and held her palm to stop him.

"W-wait! Um... t-the floor..."

Though her words weren't that helpful, following the girl's gaze helped Naruto to understand what she was trying to convey. "Ah, your book, right?"

He carefully stepped over the book and passed the bowl to Hinata. With that done, he picked the book from the ground and analyzed the cover. _'Huh? The art of knitting? Why would she try to hide this...? Bah, whatever.''_ Not bothering to digest that information, he shrugged and left the book right beside its owner.

"Um, Naruto-kun? W-why did _you_ come here?" Hinata asked, making use of the fact he wasn't focusing on her to articulate herself a little better.

"What? To bring you lunch, isn't that obvious?" He blinked once and only then his brain registered the emphasis she had put on the word "you", which made him frown at her. Could it be that she really hated him...?

Hinata, for her part, was fighting the urge to slap herself. "Nonono—I mean, yes! Y-yes, it is! B-but... um... but w-w-what about Tsunami-san?" she stuttered, and cursed herself for her blunder. _'Amazing job, Hinata! Now he thinks you are stupid!'_

The light bulb turned on above Naruto's head. "Oh, that! Yeah, she was going to be here instead, but I kinda got to have lunch earlier than everyone else and, well, the old man left the house with Kurenai-Sensei and Shino just a few minutes after we got here, so..."

He trailed off and, much to his surprise, Hinata relaxed a bit and smiled at him. "That was very kind of you. I'm sure that Tsunami-san and Tazuna-san appreciated the gesture."

"Y-yeah," he stuttered, caught off guard by the change of pace in their conversation. Explaining things never had been his strong suit... but still, somehow she saw through his words even though he stumbled over his explanations.

The girl merely bobbed her head in response, her smile faltering slightly as she realized that Naruto hadn't come here because of her specifically. _'Not that he had a reason in the first place but—'_

"But I also needed to talk with you for a bit, too," he interrupted her thoughts, picking up from where she had stopped but completely reversing the message.

"Eh? M-me...?" A nod from Naruto told her that she had heard him correctly. Taking a deep breath as subtly as she could and doing her best to recompose herself, she added: "So... how can I help you?"

Scratching the back of his head and looking away from her, he continued. "Yeah, I... just wanted to say thanks for what you did. Against Zabuza, I mean."

"B-but... I couldn't do anything. I just..."

When the shy girl didn't finish her sentence, Naruto looked back at her only to see her staring at her legs glumly. Unaware that she was being watched, he saw her mumble something in a voice too low for him to hear, but still, he managed to interpret what she had mouthed.

"Got in the way" was what he inferred from the way her lips moved, and for some reason he wasn't able to explain, it made him angry.

"I wouldn't be here if you hadn't stepped in. You saved my butt, you know?"

"Re-really?" As if what she said hadn't been enough, the shocked expression the blue-haired Hyuuga wore clearly indicated to the jinchuuriki that either she hadn't realized that fact... or that it had slipped her mind, somehow. Either way, he just nodded at her, making the girl's features color in a way that wasn't too far from the shade of lavender of her eyes.

"S-so... you're not m-mad with me?"

In a rare moment of insight, he caught the meaning of her words right away. "You landed a hit on Kakashi-sensei, sure, but Zabuza was actually trying to kill us. I can't be mad at you for missing. Where did you even get that idea?" Considering that he had just thanked her, Naruto was completely lost as to how she could have imagined he was angry with her all this time.

 _'Well,'_ Hinata thought, _'this is a relief, but... ugh, I think I'm confusing him. Better change the topic,'_ she decided _._ Naruto's expression was more than enough to tell her that she was letting her insecurities cloud her judgment too much.

"B-but i-it was nothing, really. I... a-anyone could have done that," she replied, trying to avoid his question. The only thing keeping Hinata from playing with her fingers was the fact she was holding a bowl of food.

"Well, but still... wait. Anyone?" Under Hinata's quizzical stare, the gears inside Naruto's head started turning. "But Zabuza kinda of... er, suggested? No," he crossed his arms in front of his chest, pouting, "that's not the word... uh..."

"...Implied, maybe?"

"Yeah, that! So, he implied that I shouldn't have let you switch yourself with me. What was up with that?"

"Ah, you can... if someone tries that, stopping y-your chakra flow will b-block their attempt to substitute with you," Hinata explained, remembering the lecture about the Kawarimi no Jutsu that she had listened to during her time at the academy. "It was meant to be a basic technique that... every ninja should know of. S-so that the enemy would never switch positions with you..."

 _'Seriously? But that would mean nobody would ever try it on someone else!'_ Naruto found the whole thing funny, and one second later, he realized the problem with that line of thinking. "Hey, wait a sec. But then... how did you know that it would work on me?"

Hearing that question, the bluenette gulped. _'Of all the times to be perceptive, why now?!'_

Hinata had always paid attention to when Naruto had missed any classes—or when he got kicked out, be it due to a teacher's bias or as a result of being caught during or after a prank—so that she could help him study for tests. Of course, Hinata never had been able to muster the courage to approach her crush and share the highly-detailed notes she made during those days but... how was she supposed to tell him that?

Saying "I know you missed that class" not only would creep him out, but it also wouldn't be enough to keep the blond from asking more questions. While he probably wouldn't know what to make of it, giving clues for her crush to figure out that she stalked him was not on her to-do list.

Who knew how many of her slip-ups he had noticed during the past few years? Surely, at least once he might have spotted her hiding behind a tree or a post, and... maybe he had noticed she was the only girl that never was cheering for Sasuke each time the Uchiha had been in a spar or that she was one of the only people in their class that didn't laugh at him for messing up?

Luckily for her, her stomach once again rumbled, reminded her that her lunch might go cold if she didn't eat it soon and effectively providing an escape route. But before she even had a chance to become embarrassed by her unladylike behavior, Naruto started chuckling.

"Eh, guess that doesn't really matter." Hinata did her best to not let any sign of relief show on her features. "So, I'll leave you to your food!"

With that said, Naruto started walking towards the door when he remembered something and pivoted, once again facing the Hyuuga. "Oh yeah, Shino wanted me to say "Hi" for him."

"Uh... "hi"? Shino-kun said... just that?"

Grinning mischievously, Naruto continued. "Well, he said a whole lot more than that, but I didn't have the time to jot down the whole essay." His smile fell a little as he watched Hinata giggle at his lightly humorous remark.

Whenever he tried to tell a joke to a girl, this would be the part where he would get mocked or even punched. Though he knew that it would have been impossible for the Hyuuga to punch him, considering that she was bedridden (and would have likely opted for a palm thrust anyways), the fact that she actually laughed at his little joke was very much unexpected.

And for some odd reason, he found that he liked the sound...

"Shino-kun can be... long-winded at times," she warned, still smiling. "But p-please be patient when dealing with him."

"Eh, I guess I could try," he shrugged, finally moving to exit the room for good. He didn't have anything against the Aburame, but his monologues tended to bore him. And as both Naruto and Hinata knew, a bored Naruto tended to be a rather rude Naruto.

"Oh, um... b-before you go..." Hinata began, prompting Naruto to turn around once again, which slightly annoyed him. "I... I d-didn't want to b-bother you but... can you ask Kurenai-sensei to come here once she is done eating...?"

"Sure! What do you want with her?" the blond asked, observing how the girl's face turned scarlet as her eyes landed on a door in the corner of the room."Oh, that's right... you still can't walk, so you need help to use the bathroom, huh? Man, that's gotta be embarrassing..."

"Y-yes..." she agreed, deflating completely. "At least... it will just be for today," she commented, more to herself than to Naruto. Kurenai had said that her bones had already been mended, but she would need to rest for the remainder of the day to fully heal. _'Just another day of being a burden to everyone,'_ she thought, dismayed.

Seeing the troubled, defeated expression on Hinata's face, Naruto felt the sudden urge to cheer her up. "But hey, don't worry about that! You just have to work extra hard from tomorrow on to make up for the loss; no biggie! ...And you should really start eating that food, y'know?" he added, pointing to the seemingly forgotten bowl of food that the girl held.

"Ah, you're right!"

 _'Well, that kinda worked,'_ Naruto thought. "So, I'll leave you to it, then! ...Unless you have something else to say?" he asked, this time not willing to try to make an exit until he was sure their conversation was over.

"Y-yes, I... I..." trailing off nervously, she closed her eyes. _'Focus, Hinata! Sakura-san was right, if you don't try, you will never be his friend! I can do this! … I think!'_

"I...?" Naruto repeated, encouraging her to continue.

Opening her eyes, she met Naruto's stare head on. This time, even as her cheeks became rosed, she didn't look away. "I just... wanted to say thank you, Naruto-kun."

Hinata then smiled at him. A small smile, but a sincere one.

Naruto had the weird sensation that she was thanking him for a whole lot more than just bringing a bowl of food, but despite his uncertainty about what that had meant, Naruto found himself returning the girl's smile with one of his own while unconsciously scratching the back of his head. "Oh... well, you're welcome!"

With that, the conversation ended thanks to neither one really knowing what else to say, and Naruto promptly opened the door and left. Now alone, Hinata allowed herself to relax as her smile widened. _'I did it! And I didn't even stutter!'_

Splitting the chopsticks that Naruto had given to her alongside the bowl, Hinata finally tasted Tsunami's cuisine. Though the food was no longer hot, she still felt a pleasant warmth on the inside as she ate; the smile never leaving her face. Perhaps, even though she felt that she didn't deserve Naruto's friendship... maybe it wasn't such an impossibility in the end.

Meanwhile, Naruto was walking down the stairs, ready to enter the kitchen and pass Hinata's message to Kurenai. Unlike the girl, he no longer was smiling, but he too was thinking about their interaction.

As the beginning of a headache made itself known to him, the blond realized that he had been completely wrong about one thing he had once taken as a fact. A truth of life. And yet, as unbelievable as the notion was, as impossible as it seemed... he couldn't deny it any longer.

He had been wrong.

There really was something in this world that was more confusing than math.

* * *

A/N:

...And that's it, folks!

I can't believe I actually managed to push out almost 18k words between Chapter 8 and this one. Between college and my job, I barely had any energy to write during that first week after posting Chapter 8. And when I got used more accustomed to my new routine, well, the first scene caused me nightmares.

Maybe it's because I wrote it while wiped out, but I completely hated what it. It was not THAT different from what you guys are reading, but I kinda went into chapter 9 without a solid plan for how the scene would play out, so yeah... I got really nervous about its quality.

After some guidance from _**Serious Sam**_ and my beta,  Simple Potato, as well as a good bit of polishing a couple weeks after first writing it... well, I am much happier with how it turned out. I just hope it didn't disappoint anyone that had high expectations after last chapter's cliffhanger...

That was not at all my intention, but now I've learned my lesson about using cliffhangers carelessly.

So, I hope you guys liked it. I am pleased with how the other parts of the chapter turned out, but I still have some lingering doubts about the Zabuza scene...

By the way, there was a "second" cliffhanger last chapter, so... if you all are wondering, yes, Kakashi escaped Zabuza's attack by using Kamui. He DOES have the Mangekyo Sharingan already, and it was never said that he couldn't use Kamui during Part 1. He did get a bit of a boost on his chakra reserves for this AU, which is why he didn't die from using Kamui right after a Chidori (which was meant to take 25% of his reserves at that point, I believe). Of course, not enough for him to use Kamui twice just yet, but just enough for him to do what he did here without killing himself.

Another thing you might be wondering is the OC pseudo-introduced in this chapter: Haku's sister, Haru. Kinda cliched for me to go with the twins thing instead of just Haku, yeah, but much like the third Demon Brother, I needed more people on Zabuza's side for the next battle. You will see more about Haru and how the original Haku's personality was split between the two siblings in the next chapters. I already dropped some hints but... well.

(Trivia: Haru means "spring", and Yuki means "winter". Yeah, Ace attorney-level pun, but hey, if Capcom got away with Redd White [president of Bluecorp] and his secretary, April May... well, I regret _nothing._ )

Also, other reviewers have contributed to this chapter's content. Right now _Perentie Fan_ and _xNaruhina_ come to mind as direct contributors... and like I mentioned before, _**Serious Sam** (_author of the fic **My Precious People** _)_ too. (I think I expanded on everything that needed to be expanded, but if you think I still missed something, feel free to scream at me and Simple Potato for missing it). Also, having **SilentSambo88** following my fic gave me the motivation to crank out an extra 1500 or so words on the night I got the notification. If you guys haven't checked out his fic **An Uzumaki Scorned** , or **Zorback32's Lies in the Past, Danger in the Future** (which **SilentSambo88** edits and apparently helps to write at some points), do yourself a favor and read them.

But enough of that! I... have bad news for you guys: it's almost a guarantee that I will have to delay chapter 10 by a week. As you guys know, I'm working with a "one chapter per four weeks" schedule (or trying to anyways)... and it just so happens that I will become really busy with college in the third week where I'd be working with C10. In compensation, the following week won't be hectic at all, so I will have more time to work on this and possibly enough time to compensate for the delay with a higher word count.

Anyways, I will still try to make it on time, but yeah... I will probably update my profile around the 9th to give you all a straight answer about this, but expect either a delay or a smaller chapter.

That's all I had to say about this chapter! That is, unless any of you feel like dropping a review... I don't mind discussing the fic and answering any questions you guys might have.


	10. Chapter 10 - Healing in the Aftermath

Hey everyone!

I'm happy that you guys seemed to have liked the previous chapter! And I'm even happier that this story now has over 100 reviews, over 250 follows, and 200 favorites! (well, 197 favorites as of when I posted this, but counting those that favorited me instead of the fic itself...)

Now, this is the fourth chapter of the Land of Waves arc, but unlike the previous three, this one and the next will be mostly peaceful. Combat will take a backseat for now so that the genin can train for the bridge battle, and strengthen the bonds they have formed with each other while they are at it.

This is the halfway mark of the arc, and I'm planning to put out a total of seven/eight chapters for it (and thankfully, the battle on the bridge chapters will be in the months where college will be a non-issue), so... bear with me for a while longer. I know that most dislike the "C-rank" arcs in Naruto fanfiction, especially when they stick to canon... but the Wave arc is important from a character development standpoint (even more this time around that Sakura won't stay stagnant and that Hinata is here), and I don't want to rush it needlessly.

All in all, I think I will be spending just a little less time on it than the anime (mostly because the fight scenes don't take 5+ chapters to be dealt with), but whatever... though if you actually analyze the content, Chapters 9 and 8 are actually three separate chapters with 10k words or so each. Which is why I don't feel guilty about the delay. There's even a few extra words to compensate for the second week of delay! This chapter actually got past 20k words with 42% more content than initially planned! How cool is that?

(Seriously, get something to eat if you plan to read this in one go. Or at least some water.)

I left my excuse for this delay and the next chapter's in my profile, but "college" is all you really need to know. Anyways, this chapter is more along the lines of Chapter 2 and 6 in terms of content.

Hope you will enjoy it!

* * *

 _Land of Waves Arc_

Chapter 10: Healing in the Aftermath (Current Version: 1.0)

* * *

It was only a little after 5 A.M when Hinata awakened in the morning following the encounter with the Demon of the Hidden Mist, Zabuza Momochi. She was used to waking up at that time, and despite the possibility of getting a couple extra hours of sleep, she knew that going back to bed once she awoke would be a futile endeavor.

 _'Besides, I've wasted enough time on this bed as it is,'_ she reminded herself, still feeling bitter about how she became a burden to her team practically every day ever since her training session with Kakashi. Before, Team 8 had only done D-rank missions, so even if she messed up a lot, it wasn't that harmful.

But now there would be no room for errors. The situation didn't give her that leeway anymore.

Still, Naruto had been right when he told her that she would need to work hard to make up for the lost time, and that was exactly what Hinata intended to do that day.

Getting up but not leaving Tsunami's bed just yet, she noted that Tazuna's daughter and Kurenai both were already gone from the dark bedroom, if the two vacant futons were any indication. The third futon, however, still had someone sleeping on it, and even though Hinata had forgotten which person slept where, there was no way she would not recognize the wild pink mess popping out from under the covers.

It made Hinata cringe. Even though it was probably the smallest of Sakura's problems, Hinata knew that her friend would need to spend quite a while with a brush in hand, wrestling the knots out of her hair. ' _I guess that's one of the advantages of keeping my hair short,'_ she thought, passing a hand through her own blue hair. Despite how easy it was to make it look presentable, she personally wished to have a hairstyle closer to Sakura's, but her father never allowed her to grow it out, even though he seemingly had no problems with her sister doing the same.

 _'Hanabi-chan...'_

Sighing, she decided that it was best to forget her family existed for the time being. Thinking of the Hyuuga clan in general would only remind her of what was to come after her return, and that was not something she wanted to waste brainpower on until there was no way around the problem anymore.

 _'Maybe I should take a bath to clear my head,'_ Hinata thought as she finally got up from the bed. Similarly to when she had passed out after Kakashi's teamwork test, the shy Hyuuga experimentally moved her legs around to test them, and much to her satisfaction, she felt no pain. Taking care to not disturb Sakura's sleep, Hinata quietly found her bag in a corner of the room, grabbed a new change of clothes and moved towards the bathroom.

Opening the door as silently as she could, she looked back at Sakura's sleeping form, to constate that the girl was indeed still asleep. Instead of entering, though, Hinata remained still, gazing sadly at her friend.

Hinata remembered that Sakura had awoken not too long after her interaction with Naruto, and went upstairs as soon as she ate her lunch. As much as Hinata wanted to update her friend on how she had successfully interacted with Naruto earlier, Sakura was in no mood to talk, and ended up sulking practically all day long on her bed. Not knowing how to deal with that situation thanks to her own social ineptitude, the shy Hyuuga reluctantly decided to give her friend some space and focused on her book.

The other members of Team 7 didn't fare much better when they eventually came upstairs to see their teammate. Sakura treated both Sasuke and Naruto in a curt, borderline rude manner, speaking the only bare minimum necessary to answer their questions. Though she never said it outright, it was clear to the boys that she was in no mood to deal with them, making both reluctantly back off and leave her alone.

Kurenai, from what Hinata could tell of her sensei's mannerisms, seemed to want to talk with the pinkette in private, but since she couldn't convince Sakura to leave and Hinata herself was unable to move, that conversation ended up being delayed, leaving Hinata to wonder what her sensei wanted to say. The older woman probably had an idea of what was troubling Sakura, but Hinata wasn't too sure about what it could be.

Roughly half an hour later, she exited Tsunami's room and made her way to the kitchen, feeling fresh and ready to face a new day.

Opening the door carefully, she wasn't surprised to see her two missing roommates there. Kurenai was on the table, drinking a cup of tea, whereas Tsunami was busy preparing two bentos. One, she guessed was for Tazuna, but the girl didn't know what to make of its twin. "Good morning Tsunami-san, Kurenai-sensei," she greeted the older women with a slight bow.

"Good morning indeed!" Tsunami exclaimed, smiling broadly at the girl. "I'm glad that you are walking again, uh—"

" _Hinata_ ," Kurenai whispered subtly from behind a cup of tea.

"—Hinata-chan! I take it there's no pain when you move?"

The girl shook her head. "Not at all. And, um, b-because I'm better, you can have your bed back now..."

"Don't worry about that, dear," Tsunami said dismissively as she poured some coffee in a thermos and then left the coffee pot on the table. "But I'm sure that you are hungry, so let me serve you breakfast!"

"Ah, no! P-please don't worry about me! I can prepare my own food, s-so... y-you don't need to stop for my sake," the girl insisted, receiving a nod from Tazuna's daughter when the woman decided to humor her.

Soon, the bluenette sat next to her teacher, holding a plate with a simple sandwich and a cup of tea. "Hinata, is Sakura awake yet? I need to talk with her about... yesterday."

"As far as I know she's still asleep, sensei... I'm sorry." Despite her apology, Hinata knew that she could have spied on her friend with the Byakugan to give a clear answer, but like all Hyuuga, she was taught from a young age to not invade other people's privacy and refrained from using her dojutsu when not in a mission or spar.

"If you don't mind me asking, what happened to her?" Tsunami inquired. "She was the only one that wasn't wounded, so it left me wondering..."

When Tsunami trailed off, a curious Hinata shifted her gaze to Kurenai and caught the woman's mask faltering for a second before her expression once again became neutral. "During training, I... made a mistake with Sakura, and it impacted her performance negatively yesterday. If... if you excuse me, I will go to the bedroom and wait for her to wake up."

Having said that, the Genjutsu Mistress got up from her seat to place the dishes in the sink and left the kitchen, leaving her confused student and host behind. The two exchanged a look and, not knowing what to make of Kurenai's attitude, quietly went back to what they were doing.

The silence between them remained, until the moment when Hinata heard Tsunami turning on the faucet.

"Tsunami-san? I... If it's not a bother, c-could I wash the dishes in your s-stead...?" the girl asked, her voice lowering in volume as the older woman turned around and frowned at her. By the end of the sentence, Hinata's nervous habit of playing with her pointer fingers had already kicked in and she barely had Tsunami in her field of view.

"What...? Nonsense! You are my guest; I can't let you have that kind of work on top of training and protecting my father, dear."

Undaunted despite her meekness, Hinata tried to persuade her. "B-But with ten people... there is much more work to do, right?" Tsunami considered that for a moment. She had been caught completely off-guard when her father had shown up with an extra team, and with five wounded ninja on top of it, so her workload had increased far more than she had expected. "And helping you... is the least I could do, c-considering the trouble I caused yesterday..."

Tsunami sighed, watching as Hinata lowered her head in shame. _'So that is what this is all about,'_ she realized. Not having the heart to deny the Hinata's request after seeing the expression the girl took, Tsunami relented, passing a white apron to the girl. However, since Hinata didn't know what was in each of the kitchen's cabinets, Tsunami herself had to place the plates Hinata dried in their respective places.

The two were just about to finish the chore when two more people showed up: Shino and Sasuke

"Good morning Tsunami-san, Hinata." The Aburame greeted them politely, whereas Sasuke only nodded their general direction and said nothing as he sat down near the table.

It was then that Hinata remembered something important. "Sasuke-san, your scroll...!"

The Uchiha's eyes narrowed as he tried to process her words, until he put together her question with what she was doing at the moment. "The one with everything we used two days ago? You're gonna wash those things right now?"

"Y-yes..."

Though slightly annoyed, Sasuke got up and left the room. A couple minutes later, the raven-haired boy returned, with a cranky-looking Kiba following right behind him. Unlike the other genin, the ninken-user was still clad in his pajamas, which were a simple light gray shirt and pants.

"Kiba? I believed you were asleep," Shino stated somewhat unnecessarily, noting with interest that Akamaru hadn't followed his master.

"Yeah, I was... except Sasuke here dropped a kunai right on my ear and woke me up." The Inuzuka then yawned and stretched. "And with Naruto snoring like a pig, there was no way I was going back to sleep," he grumbled, glaring at Sasuke.

"Stop being so dramatic," Sasuke scoffed, rolling his eyes. "The idiot wasn't even snoring."

Kiba pointed at his own ears. "Sharp senses, remember?"

Refusing to concede the point or admit his guilt, Sasuke ignored the Inuzuka and passed the scroll to Hinata, while Tsunami served Kiba.

"By the way, Hinata," Kiba spoke up, "you should have seen Naruto back there. He tossed and turned in his sleep, and you know what I saw...?"

Hinata heard the teasing tone of her teammate's voice, but against her better judgment, she turned her head slightly to look at him, and caught Kiba smirking. "Wh...what is it?"

"The _sexiest_ frog-themed boxers you could have imagined, with a bit of butt crack too!"

The Inuzuka's smile broadened as he struggled to not laugh when he saw how red Hinata's face became.

"Don't forget the "manly" sleeping cap," Sasuke added, smirking at the memories of how defensive the blonde had gotten about his precious cap on the previous night.

"Oh, yeah! There was that too!" Kiba finally stopped resisting and burst out laughing, his bad mood long forgotten. "That looked so stupid!"

Tsunami, however, was not amused. "You two shouldn't insult your friend—especially when he's not here to defend himself!" Withering under the woman's glare, Kiba meekly became quiet and focused on his food. "And to think he was worried about you two..." she added, intent on making the duo feel bad.

"Naruto was indeed preoccupied," Shino innocently twisted the knife further, "though I believe the one that worried him the most was Sakura."

"...I'll apologize to him later," Sasuke said as he poured more coffee into his mug. Tsunami hadn't known of his distaste for sweet things and added far too much sugar to his liking.

As the black liquid fell into the mug, Kiba's jaw also was heavily affected by the gravity and almost hit the floor. "Who the hell are you and what did you do to Sasuke Uchiha?"

"Shut up, Inuzuka," Sasuke muttered, but there was a hint of embarrassment on his usually stoic tone.

Hinata turned back to the sink and stifled a giggle at the exchange. _'If it had been only a week ago, I doubt that idea would have ever crossed his mind. I just hope Naruto-kun doesn't misunderstand his intentions,'_ Hinata thought, remembering that despite their different personalities, both herself and the Uchiha had problems with making friendships and expressing themselves. That, in addition to the boy's pride, could make bonding with Naruto problematic if he approaches it in the wrong way, much like she believed to have done at times.

"But hey, that reminds me," Kiba tried to change the subject after a brief moment of silence, "How is Sakura? She was looking pretty out of it yesterday..."

"Your sensei went upstairs to have a talk with her," Tsunami answered, not knowing what to think of the situation. "She said something about a training accident."

"An accident...?" Shino's curiosity was piqued. "Sasuke, do you—"

"No. This has nothing to do with you," the Uchiha interrupted harshly, silencing the bug-user and subsequently getting up to bring the plate and cup he had used to Hinata.

The girl accepted both items, and Sasuke was able to see the worry reflected in her lavender eyes as she faced his scowl head-on. "Sasuke-san... we are just trying to help."

"Yeah, man," Kiba agreed, trying not to glare at the black-haired boy. "No need to be such a jerk about it. If you know something, you should share it with us," he argued, hoping that Sasuke would understand that withholding information from the rest of the "pack" wasn't helping anyone.

Silently, Sasuke moved to exit the room. But just as the members of Team 8 started to think he was going to leave without even giving them an answer, he stopped right in front of the door and started talking.

"There are times where even if you know exactly what happened, you still can't do anything to help someone."

With that said, Sasuke left the room, closing the door on the way out.

"...Saying this stuff and leaving just like that; who does he think he is!?" Kiba grumbled, angrily tearing part of the bread that was on his plate and shoving it in his mouth. "That cool attitude pisses me off."

"I don't believe Sasuke was trying to look cool. That's just how he normally is," Shino stated, and the Inuzuka raised an eyebrow at him.

"What, are you saying he is just naturally cool? Didn't know you were part of his fan club, man," the pajama-clad boy said, smirking at Shino's twitching eyebrow. "I guess this is the universe's way of compensating for our team not having one of his fangirls, huh?"

As the two males of Team 8 started to banter, Hinata realized that Tsunami was no longer helping her. Curious, she glanced at the woman and saw her staring at a photo on the wall.

Mimicking the woman's actions, Hinata stopped working and analyzed the photo. ' _That's Tazuna-san and Tsunami-san... and that boy must be the grandson Tazuna-san talked about yesterday, but... who is that person that was ripped out?'_ she wondered, noticing that only part of an unknown man's torso could be seen. It was disturbing by itself, but the fact that the other three were smiling made the photo even creepier in Hinata's opinion.

As the girl started to debate with herself, unsure of whether to ask the questions that formed in her mind or if maybe it would be better to silently go back to work, Tazuna opened the door that Sasuke had closed and entered the kitchen.

"What was up with that kid...?" the old man asked, looking annoyed. They had passed each other on the living room, and Tazuna couldn't help but note the deep scowl the boy wore as he entered the guest room he shared with the other male genin. The bridge builder's features became more serious when he noticed where his daughter was looking.

"Hell if I know," Kiba shrugged. "He's always been moody like this, though."

Tazuna didn't even pay attention to the answer, and instead crossed the room and enveloped his daughter in a gentle, strong hug.

"Good morning, daughter."

Snapping out of her thoughts by the comforting warmth of her father's embrace, a small smile blossomed on her face as the old man planted a kiss on her forehead. "Hey, dad. Did you sleep well?"

As father and daughter started talking with each other, Hinata made her decision and turned around, hoping that focusing on the dishes would help her forget the scene she had just witnessed.

Tuning out their conversation, the young Hyuuga dutifully continued her work, now with the additional task of sealing the various plates, pots, and utensils that had been on Sasuke's cooking scroll. Quite a few actually belonged to her scroll, but she decided to sort them out at a later date.

She was so engrossed in her work that she didn't notice her teammates approaching until Kiba tapped her shoulder.

"Eek!"

Startled, the girl dropped the cup she had been washing, allowing it to fall in the water-filled sink and splashing water on her apron.

"Oops!" Kiba took a step back. "Wow. Sorry Hinata... didn't mean to startle you."

Instead of looking upset like many would in such a situation, Hinata only smiled understandingly at the Inuzuka. "D-don't worry, Kiba-kun. Nothing broke, so... it's alright." She then motioned towards the sink and took a step back, giving space for the boys to leave their plates and cups there.

After doing so, Shino addressed her. "You had a troubled expression beforehand, Hinata. Are you feeling unwell? Have your legs not recovered completely just yet?"

"Shino-kun, I'm fine," she answered, giving him a smile that was slightly different from the one she had given to Kiba. "M-my legs are fine too. I... I just spaced out for a bit."

Sharing a meaningful look with each other, the two male genin of Team 8 came to the unspoken agreement that Hinata wasn't being straight with them. However, neither one of them were able to press the issue further, as Tazuna's conversation with his daughter became louder and caught their interest.

"So, Inari is supposed to return today, isn't he? I can't wait to see him!"

Though the old man was smiling brightly at the prospect of meeting his grandson again, Tsunami's expression was very much the opposite. "Yes. He was... sad that you left. More than usual, I mean."

Tazuna's smile faltered and he sighed, wearily. "I just hope he managed to have some fun. A kid of his age should be smiling, playing with friends... but Inari... it breaks my heart to see what he's become."

"...You know, he was making a birthday present for you before he left. He should be arriving anytime now, so if you wait a few more minutes—"

"Eh?" Interjected a new voice. "It was your birthday, old man? When?"

"Naruto?" Kiba raised an eyebrow upon seeing the orange-clad ninja on the doorway. "Did Sasuke wake you up, too?"

"Yeah, the bastard kicked me. Said the old man was up already and that I needed to wake up," the blond answered, positively displeased.

His tone made Tazuna scowl. "Of course you needed to wake up, you lazy brat! There's a lot to do before the bridge is finished and I need to be guarded. And to answer your question, my birthday was three days ago. Still not as old as your Hokage, but I'm getting there!"

"Ah, so that's why you were hammered back then," Naruto commented idly, mostly to himself. Still he had been more than loud enough for everyone to hear him... making Tazuna shudder as he felt his daughter's burning glare directed towards him.

" _Father!_ You promised!"

"I-i-it was just one bottle, I swear! ...Please don't hurt me! I-I'm old and frail, remember?"

"You stunk of someone that had at least three different kinds of sake AND one whiskey," Kiba added fuel to the fire, finding the sight of the old cowering from his daughter to be hilarious.

"I don't even know how our sensei managed to escort you to the hotel. You couldn't even walk straight!" Naruto exclaimed as he sat on the chair that Shino previously occupied. He was exaggerating a bit, but the blond actually noticed what was going on and he hadn't forgotten the "orange diapers" incident... however...

"Oh no!" Tsunami gasped and faced Naruto. "I forgot to check on _your_ sensei."

The woman then quickly left the room, but not before giving her father one last glare. "We will continue this later," she hissed before slamming the door on her way out.

Tazuna did not waste a single second and hurriedly went about preparing his own breakfast. "Shit, I gotta do this before she gets back..."

Meanwhile, Naruto looked over the table and frowned. If the fact that he unintentionally helped Tazuna escape his punishment wasn't bad enough, he could also see that the only things available to eat at the moment didn't include his favorite breakfast. "Hey, do you have any cereal here?"

"Yup, I bought a couple boxes yesterday," Tazuna admitted. "But I'm not telling you where to find them, you disrespectful brat!"

Intending to eat his food where he could hide behind a locked door, Tazuna quickly grabbed his slice of bread and a cup of coffee before fleeing to his room, leaving a furious, perplexed Naruto behind him.

"Argh, stupid old man! What the hell?"

Kiba couldn't help but roll his eyes. "Dude, you ratted him out to Tsunami-san, _of course_ he wasn't going to help you."

The boy's comment only made the Uzumaki more annoyed. "Well, I don't need help anyways! Hmph!"

As Naruto stomped towards one of the cabinets in his pursuit of cereal, Kiba started nudging a distracted Hinata. "So, I guess I'll go upstairs to get changed, ok?"

The girl nodded as she watched her crush open the doors of the lower cabinets, and Kiba continued talking. "Shino, let's go."

"Do you require my assistance to get changed?" The Aburame asked with genuine curiosity, and an undetected hint of worry. Kiba's injuries weren't grave, but most of his torso had been damaged in one way or another. Outside of that, he saw no other logical reason for following his teammate.

"Uh... no, but... ah, yeah! Of course," Kiba nodded to himself, having found an acceptable lame excuse to use. "I forgot where you left my bags yesterday and... I don't want to open the wrong bag by accident and find more frog boxers."

In response to that, Hinata blushed, Shino raised an eyebrow and Naruto scowled. "They are toads, you dumb mutt! And I only have one of them!"

"Bah, who cares man," Kiba snorted dismissively before beckoning Shino with his hand. "Let's go already. I gotta get that lazy fleabag to wake up, too. He's been sleeping for way too long already."

"Don't be a hypocrite, Kiba. Additionally, I don't believe you need my—"

"Argh, just shut up and listen to me for once!" The Inuzuka interrupted his teammate, not only verbally but physically, pushing the Aburame out of the kitchen and stopping only to give a thumbs up to Hinata before disappearing into the living room and closing the door, leaving the girl alone with her crush.

She wasn't sure if that was a good thing, though.

 _'...Now what? Should I go back to work or... maybe I could try to talk to him again?'_ Glancing briefly at the whiskered boy, she saw him rummaging through the lower cabinets of Tsunami's kitchen... but if his angered grumbles were any indication, the cereal box he wanted to find wasn't there.

 _'No... I probably shouldn't bother him right now,'_ she decided, though she wasn't very pleased with her own decision. Before she could form a better plan, though, a loud creaking sound resounded through the kitchen and almost made Hinata jump.

"Good news!" Tsunami announced as she barged into the kitchen. "Your sensei is awake already!"

"Huh?" Naruto turned around, confused for all but one second. "You mean Kakashi-sensei is up again!? Awesome!"

"Well, up is not exactly the word I'd use but... uh, what are you looking for, dear?" the woman questioned, wondering why the boy was sitting in front of the food cabinets instead of eating his own breakfast on the table.

"Cereal!" The boy announced with an excited grin. "There's no better way to start the day, you know?"

"Ah, I see... well, father brought a couple boxes yesterday, but I don't know where he placed them. Do you need any help?" she asked, remembering that it had been a decent while since she had left the room, which meant that Naruto had been struggling some time already.

"Nah, it's okay," he said dismissively, going back to his search. "And I think Kakashi-sensei needs your help more than I do."

Ignoring the blunt comment, Tsunami shrugged. "Well, if you wish, you can also grab some cookies. There's a pot with cinnamon and apple cookies to your upper left, and there's some orange juice in the refrigerator."

 _'!'_

"Don't worry about me, I can handle this!" Naruto boasted confidently, despite how fruitless his search was turning up.

As he had his back towards her, he completely missed Tsunami frowning in response _'This again?'_ she thought, glancing at Hinata, who had refused her assistance earlier with a similar statement.

To the woman's surprise, the bluenette was looking at Naruto's direction, with a strange, almost predatory glint in her eyes. She, somehow, reminded Tsunami of a hunter that was stalking its prey, waiting for just the right time to pounce on it.

Tsunami had a feeling that the girl wasn't looking at the blond, but before she could follow the Hyuuga's gaze, the girl seemingly snapped out of it, mumbling something suspiciously similar to "Not now, Hinata." and turning back to focus once again on her self-imposed chore.

Confused, Tsunami shrugged, deciding to ignore what she saw to move on with her own duties. She prepared a reinforced breakfast for Kakashi as fast as she could and left the two genin by themselves once again.

Eventually, Naruto let out a growl born out of frustration. "Where is it...!? There's way too much stuff in here! Did that old geezer lie to me?" Naruto ranted, closing the cabinet he had been examining with more force than necessary. The loud noise made it hard to hear his whining, but if one had been paying attention to what he was doing to begin with, they wouldn't have trouble understanding his words.

Luckily for Naruto, that was exactly what Hinata had been doing, despite appearing to be concentrated in the cup she was scrubbing down. Finding the answer to her earlier dilemma, the girl finished cleaning that cup and performed the hand signs needed to activate her dojutsu.

 _'Byakugan!'_

It had taken barely a minute for the girl to find the cereal box Naruto so desperately was in need of.

She would have found it within five seconds or so, but confirming the cookie pot's location and contents had been a much higher priority... not to mention the girl had to make an effort to control the degree of insight of her dojutsu so that she didn't end up "accidentally" finding out whether they were frogs or toads... but more to the point, Hinata discovered the cereal box hidden in the upper cabinets.

But then came the question of how to put that knowledge to good use.

 _'Should I just stop beating around the bush and point it out to Naruto-kun? Hmm... he didn't seem to want any help, though. Maybe he will be annoyed if I find it for him or... he could get mad because I didn't say anything sooner,'_ she realized. _'What to do... ah, I got it!'_

Quickly, but not in a manner to draw attention to herself, Hinata dried her hands on a nearby hand towel and walked towards the table... or more specifically, one of the chairs that surrounded it. Before she could do anything with it, though, she saw an open carton of milk on the table. Her eyes briefly widened as she got an idea to make her little plan more elaborate, and she pivoted back to her temporary workplace.

Once there, Hinata picked one of the plastic bowls that she had left to dry naturally beside the sink and used a towel to speed up the process. Briefly inspecting it, the girl found the bowl to be satisfactorily cleaned and deemed it ready to be used. Grabbing a spoon from a nearby drawer, she walked to the table and placed both items in front of Naruto's seat.

Once again glancing at Naruto, she noted with relief that he was still searching for the cereal on the lower cabinets, giving her the opportunity to continue moving undetected. _'I do feel bad for him, though,'_ she remarked to herself, knowing that the boy's efforts would be for naught. Meanwhile, she filled the bowl with milk and then added a small bit of sugar to the creamy white liquid, and used the spoon to mix it.

Content with how her plan was progressing thus far, the girl nodded twice to herself. _'Right! Now, the final step!'_

Finally, the girl once again grabbed one of the kitchen's chairs and pushed it towards Naruto. This time, she purposefully didn't try to avoid making noises, and the boy instantly turned his head to look at her.

"Hinata!?" he blurted out, surprised by shy Hyuuga's presence. He had honestly failed to notice that she was in the kitchen, and struggled to remember if he had heard the door opening after Tsunami left. "What's up?"

"Oh, um, I... thought that maybe t-the cereal... I mean, i-it might be on upper cabinets if you... w-want to, maybe."

Cursing herself for messing up at the last possible moment, the girl averted her gaze and missed Naruto's expression of shock.

"Upper Cabinets...!?" Looking towards the ceiling, he saw that Hinata wasn't lying to him. "Geez, you're right! Heh, maybe I've been searching in the wrong place all along, hehe..."

Taking the chair from Hinata after thanking her, Naruto pushed it closer to the cabinets and climbed it, allowing him to reach the upper cabinets that he had completely failed to notice prior to that moment. Though he shrugged it off with a smile, on the inside he couldn't help but berate himself for that mistake.

 _'Gah, I can't believe I missed something this big! No wonder everyone calls me an idiot,'_ he thought, frowning openly now that he had his back turned to Hinata.

"I-I don't think you are an idiot..."

Naruto then heard a muffled gasp and the sounds of hurried footsteps. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted Hinata just as she reached the sink once again.

 _'Hmm... suspicious,'_ he frowned as he opened the doors of the upper cabinets. There was quite a bit of food in there, alongside some of the more rarely used kitchen utensils, such as a blender and a cake pan. The arrangement didn't make much sense to Naruto, but then he realized that Tsunami probably didn't have enough space for everything that had been bought yesterday, given that her family was small.

After grabbing his soon-to-be breakfast, Naruto got down from the chair and pushed the makeshift ladder back to its usual place by the table. But instead of sitting down and listening to his grumbling stomach, he instead stared at Hinata's back, wondering if he had heard her correctly.

Almost everyone he knew called him an idiot or at least sometimes implied as such when explaining his mistakes to him. Even if they meant well, like Iruka, the Sandaime, or Kakashi, he could still feel that they didn't think much of his intelligence even though they were aware of his potential... which meant that it was more likely that Hinata had actually insulted him behind his back, instead of disagreeing with him.

Not that he would have been bothered by yet another person calling him an idiot—or so he told himself—but seeing as he wasn't even sure of what Hinata had said, he decided to stop thinking about it. As he sat on his chair, the only thing on Naruto's mind was a slight disappointment at himself for voicing his thoughts aloud in a moment of distraction... which was, unknowingly to him, exactly what the only other person in the kitchen was thinking at the time.

But unlike the Hyuuga, Naruto stopped dwelling on those thoughts mere seconds later, when he got distracted by what was supposed to be the other half of his breakfast: a bowl of milk.

 _'Wait... when did this get here!?'_

Naruto definitely didn't remember filling his bowl, and in fact, he knew for sure that it wasn't his doing because he always put the cereal before the milk... but who could have done it for him? Tsunami was out of the picture because he hadn't told her what he was looking for... and that left him with only one suspect.

Before he could question the only other person in the room, he could feel a familiar, unpleasant pressure on his belly, which reminded him that he really should be eating instead of trying and probably failing at making sense of the bluenette's actions. _'Besides, she looks like she's pretty busy there,'_ he noted, seeing that the girl was working remarkably fast.

His confusion was completely forgotten once he started eating his breakfast, shoving spoonful after spoonful of cereal into his mouth with hardly any pauses, focused fully on getting rid of his hunger.

 _'Ah... that hit the spot!'_ he thought, happily licking his lips to catch a few errant strands of the sugary milk. With his stomach full and his bowl emptied, he got up and walked towards Hinata, with a small smile still on his face.

"Here," he offered the bowl to the girl, who was currently drying the dishes and either leaving them in a corner of the sink or sealing them into a scroll, depending on what it was.

"T-thanks," Hinata answered, taking the object from him, being careful to not touch his hand in the process. It made her feel more than a little silly, but she wasn't going to take a chance and end up dropping the bowl to the floor.

What she had said, however, managed to remind Naruto of one thing he still needed to do. "Hey... it was you who placed the bowl on the table, right?"

The only answer Naruto heard was the sharp sound of the plastic bowl hitting the floor, followed by Hinata gasping as she followed the bowl's trajectory with her eyes.

"I-I'm s-sorry, Naruto-kun! I d-didn't mean to drop it o-or to f-f-fill it without your permission!" she squeaked out apologetically as she crouched to grab the fallen bowl. Hinata kept her head lowered when she got up, not daring to look up at Naruto and discover how disappointed he probably was with her. Going back to her work would be a nice way of ending their interaction right there, but previous experiences with her clansmen made the girl stay rooted to that spot, subconsciously expecting to be scolded for her mistake.

"...You're kinda clumsy, aren't you?" Naruto spoke, not the tone of disappointment that she had expected, but with a mix of light humor and sympathy.

Surprised, Hinata looked up into the boy's cerulean eyes and gave the most eloquent answer she could manage at the moment.

"Huh?"

The blond's thin smile widened a bit, something easily noticeable to Hinata because of how his whiskers turned to a sharper angle. As confusing as he considered her to be, Naruto was starting to find the girl's awkwardness to be a bit amusing.

Though it was much better than being berated, the small smile only made the girl feel even more foolish.

She'd never confess this to anyone, but Hinata hadn't even considered that Naruto would have noticed the bowl, despite how improbable it would have been for him to miss it. It made her want to facepalm, but she didn't go through with it, despite how it would neatly justify the blush on her face if she slapped herself hard enough.

"Uh, s-so... y-you're not angry?"

"No?" He frowned in confusion. "It was nice of you to help me and, you know, even I mess up from time to time," he said, remembering how he had similarly dropped his bowl of cereal only a few days ago, causing a mess on his apartment and starting a chain of events that eventually ended with him brawling with Kiba over a lost sandwich. "Besides, if I got angry at you for that, I'd be a hippo critic."

"…"

"…"

"…"

"…"

In a few instants of silence, the occasional hesitant glance Hinata kept giving him transformed into a completely blank stare, leaving the Uzumaki feeling uneasy as her pale lavender eye focused on him.

"You'd be… a hippo critic?"

"Yeah!" Naruto exclaimed, now realizing that Hinata's reaction came merely from ignorance. "You know, like... when you complain about someone being late by just a few minutes one time even though you are usually late to everything by two hours at best? That kind of thing."

That uneasy feeling returned when Naruto saw Hinata's lip quivering, and by the time she was futilely trying to cover her giggles with her hand, he was fully aware that he had managed to mess up once again.

This left him there, standing awkwardly as Hinata giggled at him for a few seconds, only stopping when she let out a rather unladylike snort. It was just enough to get her to try to regain her composure a little, in respect to a fellow klutz.

"I think... _heehee_ , I think you meant to say "hypocrite", right?" Though the giggles stopped, there was still a silly smile on her face and a spark of amusement in her eyes as she looked up at Naruto.

"Sure, of course! We can go with that instead," he answered carefreely, trying to downplay his mistake. His attempt, of course, was accompanied by a smile that hardly reflected how he felt about the situation.

Hinata's own smile vanished immediately. "S-sorry, I just thought... um, the mental image was funny... I d-didn't mean to offend you," she explained, wishing that she could scrub away his fake smile just as easily as she could do the same to dirt in the plates and cups she had been cleaning. On that mental note, the bluenette decided to do something actually useful with the bowl she was holding, and turned to the sink to wash it, which also allowed her to avoid facing her crush.

 _'Wonderful, now Naruto-kun is upset with me,'_ she thought, suppressing a frustrated groan. It had been a stroke of luck that he hadn't been angry with her before, but after she repaid his kindness by laughing at him? Hinata had no doubts that there was an angry scowl behind that unnaturally wide grin; she had seen him doing that before at times where a normal person might have reacted angrily. That was the smile he used when he got the answers wrong during class, or when Sakura turned him down for dates. There were other situations, too, but to those she could attribute the feeling of "sadness" instead of "anger".

It is amazing how much you can find out about someone else just by observing them for long periods of time; how even the smallest of actions can betray the most well-hidden thoughts... and yet, despite how revealing words or movements might be, a person's own bias can still stand in the way of correctly interpreting another's body language.

When Hinata faced away from him, Naruto let his mask drop. Behind that forced flash of teeth, however, there was only a conflicted mix of curiosity and confusion.

What the observant Hyuuga failed to comprehend was that when Naruto's smile masked anger, it was more often than not directed at himself. Each time he laughed with his classmates after failing to perform a simple Clone Jutsu, he was angry at his own ineptitude. Each time Sakura turned him down, violently or not, what caused his blood to boil was not how unfair the pinkette might have been, but how unworthy he was of her affection when compared to someone like the Uchiha scion.

This time it was no different. He made a fool out of himself and that knowledge vexed him, but Naruto was used to being mocked for his mistakes. He was prepared for that outcome... however, Hinata was not finding amusement from the fact that he was dumb, and on top of it, she _apologized_ for laughing at him. And even though the girl refused to face him, he could still make out traces of guilt in her expression, partially hidden by one of her twin longer strands of hair.

 _'She... actually feels bad about it? But...'_

Hinata's behavior was so _alien_ to him that his brain simply failed to process that thought, leaving him confused and with a headache. Again. That one actually ended up making him frown.

Distracted by his thoughts, he didn't notice Hinata biting her lower lip as she dried her hands. Naruto's bowl had been pretty much the last thing she needed to wash, and it ended up spotless in just a few seconds.

The Hyuuga imagined her crush would have gotten bored and would have gone away, or at least that he would have awkwardly tried to change the subject... but contrary to her expectations, Naruto just stood there, silently, and worst of all, looking at her. Despite her anxiety, she didn't dare to even glance at him, but as things stood, she would have little choice but to interact with him before hightailing out of the room.

No option would get her out of the situation without making her look bad, she realized. _'Is this divine retribution for all the time I spent st—er, watching him? It must be...'_

But before the shy girl could once again curse her inability to properly talk to people in general, or before the impatient blond groaned in frustration from trying to figure out a puzzle despite not understanding all the hints given to him, the door to the kitchen opened once again.

"Hello...?"

For more reasons than one, Hinata let out a sigh of relief.

"Sakura-chan? Is that you!?"

"Hey, morning," the aforementioned pink-haired girl said, giving her a small smile to her two friends. She was noticeably less perky than usual, but it was a big improvement over how morose she was being in the previous day.

"G-good morning, Sakura-san." In response, Sakura glanced at Hinata, then at Naruto, and finally at Hinata again. The Hyuuga looked a bit conflicted, but seeing as Naruto had his back to her, she shook her head freely. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm... better," Sakura said evasively. It wasn't a lie, but it didn't actually answer the Hyuuga's question either.

"Uh, okay... and if you don't mind me asking," Naruto began cautiously, "Sakura-chan, why did you change your hairstyle?"

"Oh, this?" The pinkette brought her hand behind her neck and brushed her fingers over the thick braid that began from there. "I forgot to bind my hair before sleeping, so it was more than a little messy... we didn't have much of a choice, really."

"Ah..." Naruto nodded. He could imagine how much of a trouble a girl with as much hair as Sakura would have to take care of it, but even so, he was surprised she went for a hairstyle that made her forehead look bigger than usual—never mind that it wasn't a particularly good looking style in his opinion. The way she usually wore it was much prettier, but the practicality of it certainly resonated with him.

 _'If I was a girl, I'd want to have long hair... but I think I'd braid it out of pure laziness.'_ Some things were simply not worth the trouble, he figured.

Hinata, for her part, was hung up how Sakura used "we" in the sentence she had just spoken. "Did... did Kurenai-sensei help you braid it?" Between the serious vibe her teacher had before going upstairs, and the rough behavior the pinkette displayed around the woman the few times Hinata saw them interacting, all of it seemed rather odd to the Hyuuga.

"Yeah, she did it while we were... discussing some things," she answered, playing with the tip of her braid uneasily.

"Girl stuff?" Naruto attempted.

"Uh, more or less..." Sakura coughed and looked away, but she shook her head right afterwards. "But never mind that! Look, I have bad news—scratch that, _really_ bad news."

"Is Kakashi-sensei's condition that bad?" Naruto's question was met with a confused stare from his teammate.

"Naruto, what are you talking about? Wait, he's awake already?"

Hinata nodded. "Tsunami-san is watching over him... he woke up a few minutes ago, I think."

"Well, I didn't check on him, but I hope he gets better really fast." Sakura hesitated, but decided to drop the bomb right away. "Guys... Zabuza might still alive."

"Oh, okay—wait, w _hat the hell did you say!?_ " Naruto's loud yell completely muffled Hinata's gasp, and made both girls flinch a bit from the sheer volume. "No way! Sakura-chan, that's impossible! Those needles got him right through the neck! I saw it!"

"M-me too! A-and Kakashi-sensei took his pulse; there was n-nothing! His heart wasn't beating at all!" Hinata blurted out, clearly distressed.

Sakura raised her palms to force the duo to slow down and listen to her. "Look, I know you two don't believe me, but there are a few reasons me and Kurenai-sensei think that happened. Just let me eat my breakfast real quick and we will discuss that with Kakashi-sensei, ok?"

A minuscule nod and a drawn out groan were what the pinkette got as an answer. "You have gotta be kidding me...! That bastard is still kicking!? How!? And why can't you just spill it already!?"

Naruto scowled deeply, and Sakura mirrored his expression with little difficulty.

"Because this isn't just about you!" Though exasperated, Sakura bit back the insult that almost escaped her throat and settled just for a hard stare. "Look, calm down get the others to Kakashi-sensei and let me eat in peace, alright?"

Knowing that Naruto would just argue back and forth if given the chance, the pinkette poured a glass of milk for herself and prepared a light sandwich for her breakfast, leaving the frustrated Uzumaki with no way to vent his newfound anger.

Yet. The prospect of bumping into the black-haired jerk that dared to literally kick him out of dreamland and potentially getting into a fight, however, was very much appealing to him, so he left without saying another word.

Though still somewhat annoyed, Sakura watched him leave with a cautiously analytical expression. "Huh. I didn't expect him to be that mad about it..."

"Zabuza-san said many... nasty things to him yesterday," Hinata explained, making her friend raise an eyebrow at the use of the honorific for their enemy. "Naruto-kun is still angry, I think."

"I see... well, not really. I wasn't awake for that part."

Though the pinkette tried to keep her voice even, some bitterness still seeped through her tone. Hinata noticed it, but instead of calling her out on it, simply pulled a chair and sat beside Sakura.

"...What is it?" Sakura asked, after making sure to swallow before opening her mouth. She was not an uncivilized ogre after all.

"I'm waiting," the Hyuuga answered, flickering her eyes to the sink.

"...I see. So you were in charge of the dishes..."

It took Sakura a few moments, but she soon understood what was underneath the underneath, and smiled sincerely. "Thank you."

Mirroring the expression, Hinata bobbed her didn't know when Sakura would want to talk about what was bothering her, or if at all... but when the time came, Hinata would do her best to help her friend.

 _'I might be a disaster when it comes to talking to others... but listening? I think I can do that much.'_

* * *

Not for the first time since the conversation started, Kakashi held back a weary sigh.

The pleasure of waking up to the feeling of someone trying to drill through his eye and brain was something he fully expected, even if it was a fair bit worse than the other times he had been forced to use his Sharingan extensively. Just the same, he wasn't caught off-guard by his body protesting against him getting up, forcing him to stay lying down. What actually surprised the Copy Ninja was the apprehension he felt ever since his right eye opened again.

Now, he knew from where that sensation came from.

"So... let's go through this again," he said, taking note of the confused expressions of the people gathered around him. Of all the people currently inside Tazuna's house, Sakura and Kurenai were the only ones that didn't look confused, and he needed to have everyone on the same page if what those two were saying was the truth.

And if he were to be honest, considering the horrible pain he was in, Kakashi knew he himself could benefit from hearing the information a second time.

"What you two mean to say, is that the hunter-nin that we encountered yesterday likely was partnered with Zabuza... and that instead of killing him, he actually saved him? Is that correct?"

Kurenai and Sakura barely had the time to nod before Naruto butted in, angry and frustrated. "But how is he even alive!? I still don't get it!"

"The first clue," Kurenai started calmly, "is the hunter-nin's weapon of choice—senbon. Senbon are thin needles that have enough piercing power to pierce the skin, pressure points and even do some potentially lethal damage to internal organs, but bones and muscles are much harder to damage with needles, which make them impractical for killing, but useful when you just want to disable foes or poison them."

"Though the person would eventually choke on their own blood," Sakura spoke, "being hit in the neck wouldn't kill them right away. Not to mention that actually landing such an attack on a downed opponent like Zabuza would be much harder than hitting the heart or lungs"

"And it's pretty weird for a hunter-nin to be carrying that kind of weapon," Kiba added. "Their job is to kill missing-nin and they are always specialized in tracking AND assassination, so unless he is a massive show-off, it doesn't make sense for him to even carry a weapon with so little killing power." The Inuzuka noticed the weird looks his fellow genin aimed at him, but ignored them. Sure, he frequently skipped classes, but the most talented Inuzuka outside of the clan heads tended to be part of the hunter-nin branch of the ANBU, so obviously, he had made his research. That was his endgame plan, after all.

"That's absolutely correct," Kurenai said, smiling proudly. "Also, hunter-nins are meant to dispose of the enemy's body right away, to ensure that none of the corpse's secrets are leaked. This one actually fled with Zabuza's body, and I doubt he did it just because there were kids watching."

"Um, why would they get rid of the body?" Naruto frowned. Just when one thing gets cleared up, another turns up to make him confused. "I mean, the guy is dead, so it's not like he can say anything anymore."

This time, it was Kakashi who answered. "There are many secrets that a ninja's body can hold, even in death. Medicine you were exposed to, special kinds of jutsu or chakra, kekkei genkai, body alterations... for example, if someone were to kill me, they could take my Sharingan with them, and use that knowledge against the Leaf."

At that point, he caught Sasuke glaring at him, and the man held his gaze evenly.

 _'Not now.'_

The Uchiha got the message, huffed, and turned away.

"So," Tazuna began, "this means that demon will still be going after my head, huh'?

"Yes and no," Kakashi said. "I checked Zabuza's pulse after he got struck, and I couldn't find a heartbeat. If he is truly alive, then those needles put him in a temporary death state, and although he kept his life, it will take a while before he's able to move once again."

"But... Gatou can still send other assassins after my father, can't him?" Tsunami questioned with a shaky voice. To her surprise, Kurenai shook her head.

"I find this highly improbable. Zabuza and Gatou have a contract, and assigning the target to someone else would break that contract... which would turn Gatou into Zabuza's next target. And his partner is still there to protect him, so Gatou can't kill him to save himself."

"I'd wager it will take around a week for him to be in a fighting condition again," Kakashi added, "which is also about the same time I will need to fully recover."

"Whew... that's some good news, for once," Tazuna said, with his shoulders slumped. "I think I'll be able to make a good progress on the bridge during this week."

"About that," the silver-haired jonin started, "For today and tomorrow, I believe it will be better for Kurenai to guard you by herself."

"Fine by me," Tazuna shrugged, turning to face Kurenai "And you?"

"I was already planning for that," the woman replied sharply, making her blue-haired student realize why Tsunami had made two boxed lunches early in the morning.

"And what about us?" Naruto demanded impatiently, motioning towards his fellow genin. "Are you actually taking us out of the mission? Seriously!?"

"Stop interrupting him, dope."

Before Naruto could snarl an answer to the Uchiha, Kakashi started his explanation. "You six will be with me. I _am_ supposed to be teaching you a few things about ninjutsu during this mission after all."

"B-but Kakashi-sensei, y-you're barely able to move!" Hinata argued, hoping that the man would see how irrational he was being.

To her great vexing, the jonin just chuckled. The only thing he saw was the girl's own hypocrisy and it amused him. "I assure you that I can still train you. I just need a pair of crutches and I'll be able to move around just fine. Getting out of the bed will be the worst part, actually... but nothing I can't handle."

At that point, Tsunami quietly left the room, going upstairs to hunt for the crutches that Kakashi required. Thanks to an accident a few years ago, Tazuna had broken a leg and needed the crutches to move around. _'It's a pity I didn't remember about them yesterday... that blue-haired girl could have made use of them.'_

The search only lasted a couple minutes, but when she returned to the guest room that Kakashi currently occupied, she was very surprised to see her young son, Inari, wrapped in the strong arms of his grandfather. From where she was, only the boy's blue-stripped hat and a few dark locks of hair could be seen, but she had no doubt he still was wearing his usual clothing that consisted of green overalls and white shirts.

The scene warmed her heart, but before she could join the two, she noticed the odd looks some of the ninja kids were giving them. The blond one, in particular, seemed quite angry.

"Care to repeat that, ya brat!?"

"I told you." The boy let go of Tazuna and turned to glare at Naruto. "This training won't do you any good—Gatou's men will come and kill all of you!"

"Inari!"

"Mom?" The small boy turned around and found his mother looking at him with disapproval in her eyes.

"That was very rude! You cannot disrespect our guests like that, especially after all the trouble they had to bring your grandpa safely from Konoha to here. Most of them got hurt while trying to protect him, so apologize to them right now!"

Though he usually knew when to back down, this time Inari just turned back to the group of shinobi and glared defiantly at the eight foreigners. Could a bunch of kids, a weak-looking woman and a sickly, partially blind guy survive against the tyrant of the Land of Waves?

No... not a chance. Not when stronger men had tried and got killed for that.

"Listen up!" Naruto got up and pointed at the younger boy, not being able to stand his disbelief any longer. "This Gatou guy is no match for us! Not even one of the Land of Water's strongest ninja wasn't able to kill us, so we will definitely win! Believe it!"

Inari just snorted and rolled his eyes. "You all got beat up and, from what I heard just now, didn't even get to kill that guy. A little last minute training won't change anything! You're still going to die!"

Naruto felt his blood boil inside his veins.

 _"It doesn't matter how many of you come at me. Two, five, a dozen, a hundred—I'll kill them all, because you are **weak**."_

"You little punk—ngh!"

He was just about to advance on Inari when he felt himself being grabbed by two different people from behind.

"Argh, let me go!"

"Naruto, calm down!" his female teammate pleaded, struggling to hold the blond back.

"Yeah man, he's just a kid! He doesn't know any better," Kiba argued, wincing as the Uzumaki accidentally elbowed his belly in his attempt to break free.

Inari just found the whole thing to be pathetic and turned tail.

"Inari, where are you going?"

The boy turned his head to look at his grandpa one last time before leaving the room. "I'm going to see the ocean."

Tazuna sighed, and in that moment, he could feel all the weight of his sixty years of life. "Sorry about this, everyone..."

Hoping that he wouldn't do anything foolish, Kiba and Sakura released Naruto. Though the Uzumaki was very clearly pissed off, he still kept himself in check and didn't chase after Tsunami's son. Not that Kurenai would have allowed him to, at any rate.

Still sulking, the boy barely registered the next few moments, in which Tazuna and Kurenai carefully helped Kakashi stand until he could support his own weight with the crutches Tsunami had bought him, before leaving to the bridge right afterwards.

"Well, I suppose that I'm in charge now," Kakashi stated, after walking experimentally with his new wooden supports. "Tazuna told me yesterday... or I guess it was the day before," he shrugged as best as he could, "that there was a nice place for us to use just a couple minutes from here. So if everyone is ready, let's move out, ok?"

With a chorus of positive answers, from a couple excited barks to a barely audible "hn", the Leaf jonin and the genin of Teams 7 and 8 left the house.

* * *

Thanks to Kakashi's condition, it took more than just a "couple" minutes for the group to arrive in the woods outside of Tazuna's neighborhood, let alone find a suitable spot for them to practice. None of the genin understood what exactly made that part of the woodlands better than the others, but eventually Kakashi stopped walking and turned to face his six students.

"Alright, I guess this will do. First, let's start with a review of chakra, the ninja's primary source of power. Having a good understanding of chakra is quintessential for any self-respecting ninja."

"Aww... come on, why waste time with that? We use chakra in jutsu all the time, isn't that right Akamaru?" Kiba complained, and his partner (who was now sitting on the ground beside his master) barked as if saying something like "Even I can use chakra, you know?"

"The mutt is right, surprisingly," Sasuke agreed, ignoring the growling Inuzuka right beside him. "There is no need for that when the academy has already taught the concept to us for these past few years."

"Yeah! It's not like using chakra is hard or anything." Naruto said, grinning at his ability to seemingly make great use of chakra. _'After all, none of these chumps can do Shadow Clones, let alone use them like I do. Man, I am so awesome...!'_

"Oh yeah, Naruto? I bet you will be changing your tune soon enough." Kakashi promised. "Now, Sakura, do you mind explaining about chakra to them?"

The pinkette shot a pointed look at her sensei, making him aware that she disapproved of his laziness, but she took a step forward and faced her fellow genin just the same.

"Alright. I'll keep it simple for you guys, ok? Chakra is the life energy we ninja use to make jutsu, and is composed of two different kinds of energy. The first one is physical energy, which is the basic form of energy that we get from eating food and staying healthy and physically fit. It's used to sustain our body, but a small part of the excess energy becomes concentrated into our chakra reserves when we are idle, in particular during sleep."

"And the other variation of energy is spiritual energy, correct?" Shino asked, to which Sakura nodded with a smile.

"Exactly. Spiritual energy is a bit more of an unknown to us, even today. The myth of the Sage of Six Paths never directly addressed what spiritual energy is but... what is important to know is that spiritual energy is closely related to our willpower and current state of mind, because feelings like fear, anger and hesitation have been proven to have an effect on our chakra control. Anyways, about chakra and jutsu..."

Each jutsu requires different concentrations of those energies to come out, hence why balancing the output of physical and spiritual energies is key. Hand signs are the last part of the process, and they are used to mold the chakra into the shape we want it, and where we want it... and depending on the jutsu, you can even mix a nature element into the mix!"

Seeing as the girl was about to go a little bit further than he needed, Kakashi cut her off. "Excellent lecture, Sakura. I'm sure Iruka would be proud of you."

"I'm sure he would," she answered uncertainly, but her voice was drowned out by an exasperated groan.

"Whatever! What's the point of all these complicated explanations? Just give us a jutsu to learn already!" Of course, such impatient demands could have only come from Naruto. "We already know how to use chakra!"

Kakashi glared at him. "But you haven't mastered it, and that's why I can't and won't teach you any jutsu right now. Your control of chakra is unrefined, and you end wasting far too much chakra than your techniques require."

"Um... sensei?" Hinata hesitantly raised her hand, and Kakashi nodded at her. "Kurenai-sensei s-said that the Shadow Clone Jutsu works with p-proportions, so..."

"Well, that's correct," he agreed. "That jutsu is one of the few that always takes a certain percentage of the user's chakra, however, in the specific case of the Shadow Clone Jutsu and similar techniques, the clones consume their own chakra as their sole source of energy. Refining the user's chakra control would make the clones need less energy to work, and in turn, they would live for longer, take more damage before being destroyed, and could even perform ninjutsu without just disappearing before the technique is completed. Of course, this also results in more chakra returning to the user when the clones are destroyed by someone else."

Hearing that, the blond calmed down slightly. Even though he could make numerous clones, their durability was one of the big problems that held him back during the fight with Zabuza.

"But for some techniques, like Sasuke's Great Fireball Jutsu or Kiba's Passing Fang, there's a minimum and maximum amount of chakra needed for the technique to work. Others, like genjutsu or medical ninjutsu, require extremely precise chakra output"

The Inuzuka perked up at that. "So that's why I could barely manage a spin the first times I tried that jutsu, right?"

"Exactly." The older man then looked at Sasuke. "Similarly, I'm sure that during your training with the Great Fireball Jutsu you sometimes ended up with flames as big and strong as a lighter's... or choking on your own smoke, right?"

The annoyed and somewhat ashamed expression on Sasuke's face as he grunted and looked away said it all. "As you can imagine, this is not a situation we want to risk happening in the middle of a fight. Failing to execute a jutsu in the middle of a battle is practically the same as digging your own grave, but we also want to avoid having you six use more chakra than the jutsu you already know need to work."

"But I thought that the more chakra you use in a technique, the stronger it gets," Sakura mentioned.

"It's true that many ninjutsu can be made stronger than normal that way," Kakashi agreed, "but you need to have a good control to make that extra chakra actually affect the technique's power instead of being wasted as you mold the chakra. This is especially true for elemental jutsu, but it can affect jutsu as simple as the henge. I could talk about this topic all day, but that wouldn't make you any stronger so... let's begin the exercise."

Before that, Shino had another question. "Is this the training you threatened us with prior to our engagement with the Demon Brothers?"

"Oh, that? Well... that was just an incentive for you guys to take the fight seriously. After all, both Kurenai and myself were there to help you if the fight took a turn for the worse, so you were never in any danger... but we still needed to see how well you six would fight against a real enemy. Sorry if it came out as a threat," he said unapologetically.

"So what will you have us do, then?" Sasuke asked, impatiently.

"I just need you all to climb a tree... without using your hands," the jonin answered. While Kakashi's smile was subtle and could only be seen partially in his eyes, Naruto's huge grin was much more obvious.

"You mean the tree climbing technique, don't you!?" A small nod from Kakashi made the blond jump from joy. "Yeah! Now that's I'm talking about! I always wanted to learn how to do that, but Iruka-sensei refused to teach it to me for some reason."

At this, Hinata tried to hide a smile. She could perfectly imagine Naruto pestering the poor academy teacher, but likely Iruka didn't want to give the village's biggest troublemaker another tool to be used in his mischievous pranks, even though the boy was actually his favorite student.

"The trick to tree climbing with chakra," the jonin began, "is focusing a small, precise amount chakra on the soles of the feet. If you can keep that same concentration of physical and spiritual energies, you can climb to the top of trees as high as the ones around us. Let me show you how it's done so that you can begin."

Kakashi began to turn around to face one of the trees surrounding him when Shino intervened. "Kakashi-sensei, as an Aburame it was required of me to learn this specific chakra control exercise at an early age, because of the intricate control necessary for my clan's techniques. If you don't have any objections, could I demonstrate it in your stead?"

"Oh, you can do it already? That's pretty impressive. Young children struggle a lot to get the hang of chakra control." And Kakashi spoke from personal experience. Young prodigy or not, he had to work hard to get to where he was today. "Feel free to show it to them."

"Very well. I recommend watching me carefully." Shino closed his eyes (not that anyone saw it) and did a hand sign, which was followed by a small wave of dust and earth being cleared around his feet thanks to the chakra that was being focused on the soles. With the first step completed successfully, Shino calmly walked towards the tree that was closest to him. The boy defied gravity itself when his feet touched the tree's trunk and supported his weight, allowing him to travel vertically as if it were nothing special.

As the Aburame felt no need to show-off, he stopped once he reached one of the bigger branches of the tree, about fifteen meters above ground level.

"Well done, Shino," Kakashi said, before turning to face the other five. "This exercise is tough even for an experienced ninja. If you can keep climbing until you get to the top, you should be able to master any jutsu... well, in theory," he added, remembering his failure to continue his sensei's legacy and create the Raiton: Rasengan. He still wasn't sure if that technique was even possible, to tell the truth.

 _'This makes sense,'_ Hinata thought, mentally visualizing how the human body looked like when her Byakugan was active. _'The distance between the soles of the feet and the center of the chakra circulatory system is bigger than anywhere else in the human body after all.'_

"Heh, that doesn't sound that hard," the blond Uzumaki commented. "I'll get it done in no time at all, believe it!"

Unseen beneath his mask, Kakashi's grin widened at Naruto's comment. The other boys looked pretty confident as well, but Kakashi knew they wouldn't be very happy a few minutes from then... especially Naruto. He was sure that the blond would be throwing a temper tantrum within the next half hour, at the latest.

"It should be said that you won't be able to travel very far by walking until you are very well-acquainted with the technique, so I recommend focusing your chakra a good distance away from the tree and then running to add some momentum," he suggested, throwing five kunai a mere feet in front of each of the remaining genin.

 _'Even crippled, he's still not to be underestimated,'_ Sasuke mused. He had not noticed the jonin grabbing any kunai from the pouch on his leg or his vest pocket, let alone seen the actual daggers until they were already on the ground.

"What are these for?" Kiba wondered as Akamaru happily picked up one of the kunai and brought it to him. There was a little bit of drool on it, but Kiba was very far from the point where he actually paid any mind to that.

"You won't get to the top of the trees on your first try, believe it." At that point, Naruto was the only one scowling instead of grinning or giggling (or not reacting at all, in Shino's case). "So I want you to use that kunai to slash at the trees, to mark the highest point you were able to reach. Then the next time, your goal is to surpass that mark by climbing higher and higher, until you complete the exercise."

Finally, the man awkwardly opened his breast pocket to grab a copy of Icha Icha Paradise that he kept with him at all times, and started to catch up to his fifteenth re-read of the third volume. "You can begin whenever you are ready."

 _'Alright,'_ Naruto nodded to himself. _'I just have to focus some chakra on my feet and climb the tree. Easy stuff; I can do this!'_

Holding a basic, generic hand sign to help themselves concentrate, four of the five genin started sending chakra to the lowest part of their bodies and kept that process for a few seconds. One of them, however, did the exact opposite, by making a sequence of signs and sending chakra to the highest part of her body: the eyes.

 _'Byakugan!'_

As the world around her expanded in a sea of black and white, Hinata immediately noticed an eighth chakra signature somewhere a few feet to her left, hiding behind a tree. Tensing, the girl reflexively intensified the flow of chakra to her eyes so that she could take a look at the person's face... but as it turned out, the newcomer's chakra circulatory system was underdeveloped, which actually allowed her to see their features even without zooming in on their direction to get past the bright blue glow of chakra.

 _'That's... Inari-kun? What is he doing here? ...Oh, well, that doesn't really matter,'_ she ultimately concluded. The boy was far from a threat to anything except Naruto's temper, and she doubted he was there just to insult her crush, so she left him be.

Focusing back on her fellow genin and cursing herself a bit for not thinking of it when Shino first demonstrated the technique, she decided to watch how her friends would fare on their first try and how they controlled their chakra during the exercise. All of them had focused different concentrations of chakra in their feet, which would give Hinata various results to get her started. As such, she made sure to remember the rough level of chakra each one had on their feet before they moved.

"Alright," Naruto yelled once he was ready, "let's do this!"

Rallied by their friend and his subsequent war cry, Sasuke, Kiba and Sakura all ran alongside the Uzumaki, aiming for the trees directly in front of them, while Shino carefully made his way down from the tree he had climbed.

Later, Hinata would reflect that it was a good coincidence for her that Naruto was the slowest among the four genin and the he ended up choosing a tree that was a little bit farther than the ones his friends had chosen. Otherwise, even with her Byakugan, she wouldn't have been able to glean any information from the other three genin...

Sakura and Sasuke had very similar concentrations of chakra in their feet, with the Uchiha having slightly more of it—and much bigger reserves, Hinata noted. Both of them were quite fast and started climbing their trees in just a few seconds, and both climbed a good twenty feet or so before Hinata noticed a fluctuation in Sasuke's chakra.

Soon, the Uchiha started to lose his grip on the tree, and accidentally sent more chakra to his lower limbs to try to regain equilibrium. Sadly, the attempt ended up being too much for the poor tree, whose trunk started to crumble around Sasuke's feet. The most external layer of wood gave away, and Sasuke found himself repelled by the tree. His reaction time was good enough to make him note that and backflip away at the last second, but as he fell to the ground, Sakura continued to climb higher and higher.

Just a little before Sasuke started slipping, Kiba made contact with his own tree. Sadly for the Inuzuka, he hadn't focused enough chakra, and his feet completely failed to stick to the trunk. His skull, though, didn't have any problems connecting with the ground right afterwards.

Seeing as his master fell, Akamaru quickly ran towards Kiba, but a scream and the loud sound of something impacting violently against the ground made the dog stop before he could even reach the Inuzuka, narrowly allowing him to avoid the orange missile that blasted through where he was about to put his cute little paws on.

As always, loud noises could be traced back to a certain Naruto Uzumaki.

Hinata wasn't particularly surprised about the fact that Naruto also got repelled by his tree, given what she learned from watching Sasuke fall. She also had been expecting, though a bit sadly, that her crush wouldn't be able to get a grip on the tree at all, much like her teammate though for the exact opposite reason.

What caught her off-guard was the massive crater that was left on the tree trunk once Naruto touched it with his feet. Whereas Sasuke's hadn't been much bigger than his feat, the damage Naruto did to the tree was large enough to match the diameter of a Passing Fang attack, albeit significantly shallower.

Likewise, the blond's excessive use of chakra provoked a much more volatile reaction from his tree of choice, sending him rocketing backwards at an impressive speed. Hinata barely had the time to squeak and jump away as her crush violently crashed on the ground just a few feet to her left, and she was able to watch as he bounced a few feet off the ground with just enough force to flip him in midair before he landed again, skidding face-first into the grass until he ended just a mere feet away from Kakashi.

Somehow, the jonin managed to erase any hint of surprise from his face and voice as he addressed the orange-clad boy. "It didn't seem like you had much difficulty doing that, but I think you went the wrong way."

"I... hate you," he croaked, struggling to get more air into his recently emptied lungs.

 _"Hey!"_ The group heard a high-pitched yell from above. " _Are you alright down there, Naruto!?_ "

Naruto raised his head from the grass towards one of the trees, where he could see a pink/red blur sitting on one of the branches high up. Still disoriented, he managed to raise his left hand and do a thumbs-up to answer the question.

"We think he's fine!" Kiba shouted back as he and the other genin approached their fallen comrade.

Groaning, Sakura decided that "we think" wasn't good enough for her, and focused a good amount of chakra on her legs, which would protect her from harm once she landed on the ground

"That was... remarkable," Shino commented as he watched the blond shakily tried to get up from the floor.

"And for all the wrong reasons," Sasuke added as he walked forward and offered a hand to his teammate.

"Ugh... what a crappy day," the blond whined, before accepting the Uchiha's offer. Grabbing the raven-haired boy's hand, Naruto tried to support himself to stand up, but a sharp, burning pain in his dominant limb made him fall once again.

This time, Kakashi allowed himself to look worried. "Naruto, did you break your arm?"

"H-he didn't... t-t-the bones a-aren't cracked at all," Hinata confirmed after scanning the boy's skeleton. The Byakugan gave her what was essentially an X-ray visor if used with enough chakra, but while it saw many things the naked eye didn't, certain details could easily pass unnoticed with the dojutsu activated.

"That smell," Kiba sniffed the air and frowned. "Could it be—"

"Blood?" Sasuke displayed the hand he had offered to Naruto. The palm was stained with red liquid near the wrist, but there were no visible cuts. "That's exactly what it is."

 _'Blood!?'_ With a shocked gasp, Hinata immediately deactivated her dojutsu and took another look at the scene around her... and in the process, missed Inari leaving the scene.

 _'What a bunch of jokers,'_ the boy thought, shaking his head. _'These weaklings will die, and they will take grandpa with them too... dammit! Why can't they go away already!?'_

Tazuna's grandson believed that without shinobi bodyguards, the bridge builder would give up on his biggest project and would no longer be a threat to Gatou, which would allow him to keep his life. But with those ninja "protecting" him? Then the situation changed, and Inari simply couldn't bear the thought any longer.

Crying openly, but silently, the young boy left the area as fast as his little legs could take him.

Meanwhile, Hinata was inspecting the area where Naruto had crashed. It wasn't very easy to spot the blood on the grass, but the evidence on the kunai Naruto dropped on the ground nearby was unmistakable.

When she turned back, Sasuke had already managed to help Naruto get up.

"Alright, let me see your hand," Kakashi commanded gently, and with an embarrassed smirk, the genin complied.

"Heheheh... I guess I cut myself after _that_ happened."

"Hmm... well, the good news is that the cut isn't deep, even though it's pretty long," the jonin said, still examining the wound. It began near the wrist and was just a couple inches away from reaching the elbow.

"And the bad news?" Shino inquired.

"This jacket is going straight to the trash can when we return," Kakashi concluded with an eye-smile. "The right sleeve is ruined, after all."

Kakashi meant that comment just as a light joke and, in a roundabout way, it was how he told his students that Naruto wasn't in any actual danger, but he didn't expect that his wounded student would look so shaken after what he said.

"W-what? Y-you're... you're gonna throw this away!?" Naruto stuttered, his voice cracking.

"Hey, he's right," Sakura concurred, making the blond face her. "It's not like you don't have plenty of orange monstrosities that look just like it, so there's no problem, right?"

"No problem...? Of course there's a problem!" The blond growled, pointing to himself incredulously. "This is the original one!"

"Regrettable," Kakashi commented with a tone that made it clear to everyone that he didn't give a damn. "But it's unusable like this. And you will be just as unusable if you don't get that cut patched up. Or do you want to bleed to death?"

Shaking his head after a groan, both as an answer and as a small way to vent, the blond approached his teacher.

"Shino, since you already know this exercise, help me out for a bit." The Aburame nodded to Kakashi, who was still being stared at by the other genin. "As for you four, go back to your training. We can take care of this."

Sharing some worried, confused glances among themselves, Sasuke, Kiba, and Sakura did as told and moved back towards their trees, ready to try climbing higher than before—or at all, in Kiba's case.

Soon, with the help of a water bottle and some tissue, most of the blood seeping out of Naruto's wound had been washed over. Also, his torn jacket had been removed, leaving him in a simple black T-shirt.

"Alright, there should be some bandages in this scroll," The jonin mentioned to Shino as he grabbed a white scroll with the symbol of Konoha's hospital from one of his pockets and handed it over to the Aburame. The boy nodded, and at that time, Kakashi noticed that one of the kids was still there.

"Hinata, do you need something?" he asked after seeing the girl nervously fumbling with a small, circular brown container.

"I... um, I have t-this ointment here and, and I-I thought it could maybe... help," she mumbled, from a safe distance.

"An Ointment? Why would I need that?" Naruto questioned her bluntly, gripping his wounded arm to slow down the bleeding. "I don't have a rash."

"I-It's not for that! W-well, you can use for that too but—I mean, it helps!" She affirmed in a rush, and tried to calm herself afterwards. _'Come on, Hinata! You talked to him before, and you actually are sure of what needs to be said this time! Just do it already!'_

Momentarily emboldened, she took a few steps forward and offered the ointment to the blond. "It will help to p-prevent infections, and... and it will help your body heal the wound, too."

"Oh... ok then! I'll take it," he said, grabbing the little container from the bluenette's hands before she could see it coming, or even process how he touched her hand. Naruto had already had an infection once or twice, and he really had no desire to go through that again.

After rinsing his hand and arm once more, Naruto applied the ointment on the wound.

"I believe I found the bandages," Shino mentioned, looking up just in time to see Naruto's wound closing almost completely.

"Hey, this thing's really good! Where did you buy it, Hinata?" Naruto said with amazement, but to his confusion, both Kakashi and Hinata were looking at his arm in shock.

 _'This isn't natural... and an ointment would have never sped up the process to this degree,'_ Kakashi thought. _'This must be an effect of the Kyuubi's chakra.'_

"I made it myself," she commented without thinking, lavender eyes still trained on the Uzumaki's arm. "B-but it wasn't supposed to work this fast!"

Kakashi's eye narrowed for a split second. "Well, maybe your ointment is stronger than you thought, which is great for us," he said, eye-smiling at the girl. "Thanks for helping my student, but don't you have some training of your own to do? I haven't seen you climbing anything so far."

"Oh... y-yes, of course. Sorry..."

Sharing a look with Shino, she noticed that he was frowning slightly as he made his way to Naruto and bandaged his arm. Hinata understood that sign as her teammate being suspicious, which meant she wasn't imagining things. _'Something is wrong here...'_

While the Hyuuga once again activated her dojutsu, Kakashi awkwardly patted Naruto on the back. "Now, try to not destroy any trees on your next try, alright?"

"Hmph! I know that already," the blond scowled, shoving Hinata's ointment somewhere inside the weapons pouch on his leg and grabbing one of his own kunai on the way back. "And thanks for patching me up, I guess..."

After muttering that apology, Naruto walked away until he was facing another tree. Taking a cursory glance around himself, he noted that Kiba had started to climb a small height already but kept slipping down. Sakura was just a red-ish blur high above the treetops, and most importantly, Sasuke was also starting to make some decent progress and no longer broke the trunk of his tree while climbing.

 _'Heh... looks like I'm the dead last, again,'_ he thought bitterly. _'Then again, it's not like I wasn't expecting to be beaten but... just not that badly. Or that Sakura would actually be in the lead,'_ he added, only now processing the fact that Sasuke wasn't the best of their team, for once.

Masking a sigh, he walked towards a tree that wasn't anywhere close to the one had previously bombed, and with his target chosen, the Uzumaki started focusing his chakra, allowing it to pass freely down his legs. Soon, once he gathered an amount that was a decent bit smaller than his previous try, he cut off the flow. _'Alright, this time for sure!'_

Determined to do much better than his disastrous first try, Naruto ran as fast as he could towards his tree of choice... but he was only able to walk a few steps before being interrupted by a soft voice.

"Naruto-kun, w-wait a moment!'

Stumbling, the boy slowed down to a halt and turned around. Behind him, he could see Hinata with her arm outstretched towards him, but the girl quickly brought it back to her side.

"What is it?" he asked, trying to keep the annoyance from seeping into his voice.

Hinata winced a bit from the tone, however. _'He's still angry with me... but he needs to know what I saw!'_

Steeling herself, she pressed forward. "I... well, I was w-watching everyone and... I, uh, know where y-you went wrong. You used too much ch-chakra."

"I guessed as much," he crossed his arms in front of his chest. "I was going to use less chakra this time, you know?"

"M-maybe so, b-but it was still way too much!" Truth to be told, Hinata didn't see any difference in his chakra levels, but Naruto didn't need to know that. "Y-you'd need much less than half of what you used, Naruto-kun. Or else you... will just be repelled again."

Naruto stared at her as he considered her words. _'Less than half? I wasn't even using that much chakra to begin with! But... oh well.'_ He wasn't the one that had the Byakugan after all, so he decided to trust the shy Hyuuga's words for the time being.

Hinata, for her part, felt more than a little uncomfortable by the brief stare, but held her ground. As ugly as she knew her dojutsu made her look like, she knew her enhanced eyesight would be very necessary during the exercise, or at least at first.

"Alright then," Naruto began. "So, I know you still have your own training but... well, I guess I always had a lot of chakra, so I don't know very well when I'm using a lot of it. Do you mind helping me out a bit?"

"Um... n-not at all, but I... uh, don't know if I can," Hinata replied, turning her head a bit to face Kakashi.

The jonin merely did a "shoo" motion with one of his hands. "Just this once," he said.

Normally, Kakashi wouldn't have allowed this kind of arrangement, but after hearing about Naruto's trouble in dispelling genjutsu, he knew that the boy could use the help. _'Controlling the chakra output mid-run is the hardest part, though. He will be on his own for that, but I'm glad he's actually swallowing his pride and looking for help.'_

While Naruto and Hinata tried to find a reasonable amount of chakra for the blond to work with, Kakashi felt Shino approach him.

"Sensei, since I have already proved my mastery over this exercise, what would you have me doing instead?"

Kakashi sighed. He was looking forward to the next scene on his book, but it seemed that it would have to wait.

"Well, Hokage-sama wanted for another jonin-sensei to teach about tactics," he said, remembering one Asuma Sarutobi, "but I suppose that discussing strategies is the best we can do for now. But once one of your friends gets to the top you will be sparring with that person for a while, and after another one does the same, I'll continue with my ninjutsu lesson."

"Understood."

"Now then, let's go over the strategy you came up with for the bell test..."

* * *

Kakashi's instructions regarding the kunai's purpose were clear: you do not use it cut yourself, but instead, you cut the tree in order to mark your progress. This was to allow the genin to see how far they climbed and incentive them to do better on their next run.

Sakura had obediently listened to her sensei and slashed at the wooden trunk each time she felt her feet slipping throughout the three or so hours the genin spent in the woods, practicing how to climb trees using chakra.

This time, however, she didn't cut anything; there was no need to track how high she had climbed any longer. She had gotten to the very top of the tree, and stood on the highest branch that she had found. It had been taunting her mercilessly for the past half hour or so, but she finally made it.

Panting heavily from the exertion, the girl stopped hearing her own erratic heartbeat and instead focused on the view presented around her.

"Wow...! This... this is awesome," she muttered as she looked around herself. She could see the various patches of forests and houses around the island she was on, birds flying in the infinite, cloudless blue sky... and if she forced her vision a bit, she could see glimpses of a few of the other islands that composed the Land of Waves. Ultimately, however, what held her gaze was the bridge where Tazuna and Kurenai undoubtedly were. Or rather, the ocean that expanded beyond the unfinished concrete structure.

The borders of the Land of Fire were impossible to perceive from that distance, but still, the girl couldn't help but stare in that direction. Would she ever be making her way back to her family? Would it be by walking down the bridge once it was finished... or would she be traveling by boat after failing to protect Tazuna, perhaps even with her own lifeless body sealed in a black scroll so that she could be properly buried later?

"No... forget about this!" she issued the order, shaking her head forcefully and not caring at all that she was actually speaking to herself. This was not a moment to be shackled by her fears.

Because, even though the strong winds often sent stray annoying strands of hair or leaves into her face or eyes... even though the strong sunlight and the exercise left her skin wet with beads of sweat and pushed her body past her limits... and even though her butt was hurting quite a bit from a botched landing when a bird flew right into her face, she still felt herself smiling.

It was a moment to bask in her success.

She sat down on the branch to rest for a bit and catch her breath before climbing down, but as she did so, she remembered her conversation with Kurenai.

"She was right. This feeling of uselessness... if I can channel that into energy instead of feeling depressed about being weak, only then I can actually take a step forward and become stronger. Fear won't solve anything."

With that reminder, Sakura rose to two feet and made her way down, jumping from branch to branch until she landed on the grassy ground... and slumped against a nearby tree, letting her back to slide against the trunk until she was basically sprawled on the ground.

 _'That was so tiring... but in the end, I did it!'_

The girl's silly smile faltered a bit when she saw how the other genin were faring. She barely caught a glimpse of Hinata dashing back to her own tree, and looked just in time to see Kiba falling down. The boy had a predatory smile on his face as he looked over the scratched trunk he had been climbing, apparently satisfied with his progress even if he was far from getting to the top. Sasuke had been no more than a blue blur that she had passed by on her way down. But Naruto...

"This is so stupid!" he shouted, angrily running his hand through his messy blond mane and accidentally untangling a leaf or two that had been stuck in there.

 _'Poor guy... he's not doing so well,'_ Sakura remarked to herself. She could see that he had barely managed to climb three meters. Compared to Kiba, who was the second worst at tree climbing, Naruto would need to almost quadruplicate his record in order to not be the very last among the genin, assuming Kiba didn't advance at all.

Naruto kept staring daggers at the tree, almost as if wanting to make the object bow to his will and allow itself to be climbed without making things difficult for him. Needless to say, he didn't get very far by glaring at the plant, so much like Sakura herself, he did a quick scan to see how the others were doing, and his nasty scowl deepened quite a bit when he realized how far behind he was from Kiba... and most importantly, Sasuke.

' _Oh?'_ Sakura raised an eyebrow, noting that Naruto then moved to stare thoughtfully at the cream-colored blur that was undoubtedly Hinata. The boy then shook his head, as if deciding against something, and ignoring both Shino and Kakashi (who were still discussing tactics), settled his gaze on Sakura.

"Hey, Sakura-chan!"

"What is it?" she asked as he dashed towards her.

"Say, how far did you climb? You are the one that takes the longest to get back down, so..."

Sakura found it was a little sad that he was in a position to actually notice that. "I just came back from the top, actually."

The boy's blue eyes widened in wonder. "Wow, already!? Way to go, Sakura-chan! Amazing!"

"The view up there is the real amazing thing," she corrected. "But... why do you ask?"

"Well, you see," he began, scratching his head again, this time in discomfort. "I kinda didn't get the hang of this thing just yet. So, I was wondering if you could give me any tips since you got it right pretty quickly. Hinata helped me find the right amount of chakra, but I keep slipping or breaking the tree and I already bothered her once, so..."

"Hmm..." Sakura didn't let her surprise show. She was sure that Naruto would be giving up after that small temper tantrum, but she had forgotten how persistent the prankster could be... and he had let slip up a very interesting bit of information at the end, too, but that was beside the point.

"Do you remember what I said about spiritual energy earlier?" Naruto opened his mouth to answer, but Sakura cut him off. "Wait, forget that. Stupid question. Anyways, spiritual energy is closely related to our willpower and current state of mind," she parroted. "In other words, when you are angry or upset, you end up mixing the wrong amounts of that energy into your chakra, which makes you subconsciously add chakra or take chakra from the mix you are using to climb the tree."

"... So what you're saying is that if I'm angry, then I'll just keep messing up?"

"Basically," she nodded, and to his surprise, smiled a bit at him. "Look, Naruto, everyone has their own pace. You don't need to feel bad about not keeping up with genin that had special clan training from a young age," Sakura said, making a mental note to follow her own advice sometime soon.

"But... you're not from a clan either," he argued, tilting his head in confusion.

"Right," she conceded, "but this is an area I personally excel in. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, Naruto. If this exercise was about stamina or chakra capacity, you'd get it right in a flash."

Naruto considered that for a moment, but looked unconvinced.

"And besides," Sakura continued, "there's nothing wrong about not getting it done by today." As she finished saying that, the girl pointed at somewhere behind Naruto, and when he turned to look, he saw Hinata landing after slipping up halfway through the tree. The girl had deactivated her dojutsu a few hours earlier, as she found out that the cost maintaining the Byakugan was more significant than the information she got from her enhanced vision once she got the hang of climbing.

"I think Hinata has a decent chance of getting it done by today," the pinkette continued, "but Sasuke and Kiba are having a lot more trouble in maintaining the right amount of chakra. If you want to beat them so much then you will have about a full week to try. I really doubt they will get it done before that."

"Hmm... well, I guess you are right," he shrugged and then shot her a wide smile. "I'll just keep trying, then! Thanks for the tip!"

"You're welcome," she called out to him as he ran off. Naruto was just about to focus some chakra and challenge his tree once more when Kakashi decided to speak up.

"Alright kids, that's good enough for now. Let's go back to Tazuna's to get lunch, and then we can come back here to train some more, okay?"

Sakura giggled a bit to herself when she saw the pout her blond teammate made at being interrupted, but her expression fell when someone landed right beside her, the unexpected soft thud of the landing scaring her.

"Wha—Sasuke-kun!?"

"Need some help?" the Uchiha asked bluntly, offering her his hand. As always, the stoic boy skipped pleasantries and was as direct as he could.

"...Sure," she answered, after taking a second to process what happened. Her still sweaty palms gripped Sasuke's icy cold hand and, with a slight pull from his part, she managed to get up. Part of Sakura was actually glad Sasuke came when he did, because she hadn't been too sure of her ability to get up on her own.

But... it was still hard to face him after she failed him so badly in the fight against Zabuza. He had trusted her to give him an opening, and she couldn't even do that. The shame made her unable to even look at her on the day of the fight... but this time, even though she wasn't sure for how long she could keep it up, Sakura held his gaze.

"I see that you managed to get to the top," Sasuke kicked off the conversation. He considered asking her if she was feeling well, but seeing how it lead to nowhere yesterday, he decided against it.

"Yeah... it was easier than I imagined, but I'm glad I managed it when I did. I'm not sure I could climb again even if I wanted," she confessed, laughing a bit. "My legs still feel like jelly."

"Hn. Lunch came at the right time, then," he replied, wondering if maybe Sakura had been the reason Kakashi had called for this break. The jonin seemed to not care, but Sasuke knew he was always watching.

"I... guess so," she offered lamely, emerald eyes darting around the woods trying to find a way out of the conversation. As it turned out, Hinata chose that exact moment to land on the grass, giving Sakura the opportunity she was looking for.

"Um, if you'll excuse me, I need to talk with Hinata. Girl stuff," she added, knowing that this detail would make sure Sasuke wouldn't try to overhear their conversation.

"Right," he nodded. "I'll be going on ahead, then."

Mirroring him, Sakura also nodded and started to walk as calmly as she could toward the only other female of their group, but Sasuke's voice made her stop cold in her tracks.

"Keep up the good work."

When she turned her head around, he and the other boys were already walking away. None of them saw her mouth hanging open in shock, or her subsequent sigh of relief as she looked forward once again. She could see Hinata approaching her, and waved towards the girl.

"Hey, Hinata!"

"H-hello, Sakura-san," the Hyuuga greeted back with a small smile. "Congratulations for reaching the top."

"Thanks! So, how far did you manage to go?" Sakura asked, motioning for her friend to come with her as they followed the rest of the group, purposefully hanging back as to not be overheard. And this time, Sakura made it a point to track down Shino to guarantee it.

"I got past what I believe to be the halfway mark just a few minutes ago." Hinata's reply was punctuated with a small giggle. "I never imagined I'd be able to do so well..."

"You just have to put your mind to it," she shrugged, smiling as well. "And talking about doing well, I heard an interesting bit of information from Naruto just now..."

"R-really?" Hinata leaned forward, clearly interested.

"Yup! But before that, tell me... any progress with your quest for friendship? How are things going on your end? You've been walking around unsupervised for a while now..." Sakura chose to not say anything about how she didn't buy the Hyuuga's previously mentioned change of plans.

"Well... y-you see..."

And thus, for the next ten minutes or so Hinata went through her successes and failures with Naruto, mostly focused on the two bigger interactions they had with no one else nearby, but also explaining a bit more about what happened when Naruto injured himself.

"—but the wound healed right away, and I know my ointment isn't that strong. It was so... so unnatural," Hinata frowned, ending her report.

"Hmm... now that you mentioned it, I don't remember seeing his cut when we last talked, either." Sakura tried to check if Naruto's wound was still there, but the blond was a bit too far away for her to be sure. Shrugging, she gave up and continued the conversation. "Anyways, I'm glad things are going well on your end. I'm sure you will be able to talk normally with him in no time!"

"I r-really hope so," Hinata agreed, smiling awkwardly. "And it's thanks to you supporting me that I've managed to get this far with Naruto-kun, but..."

"But...?" Sakura arched her an eyebrow at the Hyuuga, who now looked quite a bit uncertain of herself and started to play with her fingers.

"Um, Sakura-san, can I ask you s-something?" After a nod, Hinata continued. "Why... why are you helping me like this? I, I mean... we studied together for years, but... y-you never talked to me outside of a few times we ended up on the same group... I don't really understand why you would approach me."

"...You're right," Sakura admitted. "I barely ever said anything to you when we studied together. You were kinda in the background for most of that time and, well, you clearly weren't after Sasuke, so I saw no reason to talk to you. But can I be really honest with you, Hinata?"

"Er, s-sure?" The bluenette mumbled, being anything but "sure" at that moment.

"Kurenai-sensei gave my team a massive scolding before we met up with Kakashi-sensei and your team, and part of what she said was about how I and Naruto kept badgering Sasuke-kun and myself, respectively," Sakura explained, cringing at the last bit. She still couldn't comprehend how blind she had been, tormenting Sasuke with her pushy ways while Naruto annoyed her to no end by doing the exact same thing.

"I thought that after that, he'd leave me alone for a while and... and when I saw you, I thought that helping you bond with him would have been what I needed to keep him away from me, in that sense, for good. You seemed like a nice girl, and you actually had... interest in him, so I went for it."

"I... I see. Do... you hate Naruto-kun that much?" Hinata questioned, refusing to look at Sakura for the moment.

"...Heh, it looks that way, doesn't it? But... that's not it," the pinkette denied. "Kurenai-sensei also told me that my behavior towards Naruto was wrong."

Hinata bit her lip and did her best to resist the urge to react to that last statement. Even so, she couldn't stop her fist from clenching or her brow from tightening.

"She also told us he had a few problems... remember that stuff you talked about with Sasuke? About the demon? Well, I had no idea about what was up with him—I still don't, actually—but I didn't think I'd be able to form any kind of bond with him if he kept begging for dates all the time. Kurenai-sensei told me that my role in Team 7 was to support him and Sasuke-kun, both in and out of the field, but Naruto would totally misunderstand the situation if I tried to get closer to him."

Sakura's initial plan was to merely try to approach Naruto while making it clear to him that she was still after Sasuke... but once her anger over Kurenai subsided, Sakura found that she had trouble approaching the aloof Uchiha, which invalidated that strategy.

"So... y-you actually just wanted to help him?" Hinata asked, to which Sakura nodded.

"Though I can't deny that getting him off my tail would be great, but yeah," the pinkette confirmed, glancing at her friend to gauge how she was taking it. _'She seems a bit more relaxed now,'_ Sakura noted to herself, having previously spotted the signs of anger the usually calm Hyuuga had failed to mask.

"But Naruto-kun is such a wonderful person..." Hinata muttered. The idea of not wanting to spend time with him was completely incomprehensible to her.

"Maybe," Sakura conceded. An "annoying but nice guy" was as far as she was willing to take it, personally. "But the way he was always after me was _so_ annoying! I know I really have no right to complain, but... well, the first few times I felt flattered and put him down nicely, but he just kept coming back over and over again!"

"He never gives up," Hinata commented with a crooked smile, to which Sakura giggled.

"Yeah, indeed. But eventually, I noticed that almost always he would only make a move when Sasuke-kun was around. I went as far as staying one full week away from Sasuke-kun just to test it, and Naruto only asked me out on the first day."

"Really!?"

"Yeah, can you believe it? That's when I figured out that he didn't really want to ask me out because of who I am. I was just another way for him to compete and lose against Sasuke-kun. That made me lose all the patience I had with him." Perhaps coincidentally, that's around the time Sakura decided to make her answers more obvious by punching Naruto when he wasn't welcome.

"S-so you think Naruto-kun doesn't like you at all?" Hinata questioned, all while going over some of her memories of Naruto to see if she couldn't reach that same conclusion.

"I'm not sure, maybe he does feel something. When I still gave him enough room to do it, he always complimented me a lot. It... was kind nice, actually," Sakura admitted. Even today, she didn't have a lot of confidence in her looks, so the boost to her self-esteem was certainly welcome. After all, her forehead had gotten even bigger as the years passed, but to her absolute terror, her chest still refused to get the memo and do the same.

A subtle glance at her companion told Sakura that even though the Hyuuga was almost a full head smaller than her, even Hinata was far ahead of her in that race. The girl's coat helped hide it, but the fact that _they_ were visible at all made Sakura feel... inadequate.

 _'Though... is it just me, or her chest seems bigger than before?! Aw, you have gotta be kidding me! Why...?!'_

"I see..." Hinata spoke in a neutral tone, oblivious to the train of thought she had just interrupted. "Thank you for being honest with me, Sakura-san."

"Hey, I didn't say I was done yet. You asked me why I approached you, but I didn't actually say that much about you in particular, right?" Confused, Hinata managed a nod.

"I didn't try to be your friend or help you just because of Naruto, believe it," Sakura said, shamelessly stealing her teammate's catchphrase and earning a muffled laugh from Hinata for her copyright infringement. It made Sakura herself smile cheekily, but that changed in a few seconds.

"I doubt you remember, but... I was very meek and shy when I was younger. Many of the kids bullied me because of my stupidly big forehead, because I was a civilian, because I didn't understand what chakra was very well... I used to hide from others, stay silent as much as I could and I never fought back when others insulted me. I always kept my head down and... I used to cry a lot back then, too."

Even now, reminiscing about those days... the insults, the mocking laughter... sometimes left her crying just like before. This time, though, she held strong and refused to let those tears fall from her eyes, even as they became moist... and even as she remembered the young heiress of the Yamanaka clan.

"But one day, someone came to my defense. This person... she helped me to hide my forehead, she talked back to the bullies until nobody tried to call me names anymore a-and even taught me how to throw a punch at those idiots. I wasn't originally that much of a shy girl, but the academy made me like that. And that person... she helped me come out of that shell I made for myself." she remarked with a small laugh and a sad smile, remembering that great friendship she threw away without a second thought, all because of a childish love rivalry.

Even today, she still regretted that decision.

"Sakura-san... I... I never knew..." Hinata mumbled, lowering her head. "I'm sorry for doubting you..."

"Hey, don't worry about that," Sakura laughed a bit, and her friend now raised her head to look at her. "But do you get it now, Hinata? When I looked at you, and actually paid attention to who was in front of me, I saw that young pink-haired girl that didn't know how to find her way through the people around her. You being able to help my situation with Naruto was certainly something I considered, but the real reason I even tried was because I wanted to help _you_ too."

"M-me?"

"Yeah! I can see that there's a whole lot more to your shyness than what I went through, but... I can relate to you a bit. I know how awful it can feel when you want to talk to people and make friends but you simply can't speak or make a mess out of it, so I couldn't help myself." The girl's smile then lost it's gentle curve, trading it for a teasing, amused edge, "That, and I think your attempts to talk to Naruto were super cute."

"T-there's nothing cute about that!" Hinata protested weakly, blushing fiercely as Sakura broke into a fit of giggles at her reddish pout. Once the pinkette settled down, though, Hinata tugged at her sleeve, making Sakura stop.

"What is it?" Sakura asked in confusion, until Hinata took a step back and bowed to her.

"Thank you very much for helping me, Sakura-san. This... really means a lot to me!"

"H-hey, there's no need to go that far!" Sakura insisted, awkwardly. "Come on, you don't need to be that polite around friends..."

"Um, sorry."

"Look, you shouldn't apologize for every single thing either! It's fine, really."

"Ah, of course. S-Sorry..."

" _Hinata_..."

With a small squeak, the girl covered her mouth. "...Oops?"

Sakura sighed. "Well, looks like we have a long road ahead of us... and on that note, we should keep going before the boys get out of sight," she said, feeling a bit silly afterwards once she remembered her companion was a Hyuuga.

Eventually, the pinkette spoke again, with a small hint of frustration in her voice. "Heh, though I think the hardest part will be yours, actually."

Hinata hesitated. "...What do you mean?"

"I mean that you offered to teach me how to cook, remember?"

"Oh... yes, w-well, but onigiri really isn't that hard. I-I'm sure you will get it in no time!" Hinata offered supportively, but Sakura just pouted and looked away, with her arms crossed over her chest.

"They said the same thing about fried eggs, too... mother never allowed me to go near the stove after _that_ happened."

As a violent chill ran down Hinata's spine, she wondered if, perhaps, agreeing to teach Sakura hadn't been a mistake...

 _'Just what did I get myself into...!_ _?'_

* * *

A/N:

And we are done here. Finally, huh?

I hope you guys liked this one and that it was worth the wait, though. It had no action at all, but while I've been getting praises for my fight scenes, I guess they are not the big reason you all are sticking around, eh?

I wanted to add a scene with the villains too, but as you just saw, the chapter became a little too big for that. The first scene kinda became a monster all on its own, just as it happened in Chapter 8, in but I suppose it works out in the end. Chapter 11 wasn't going to have anything concerning them.

And speaking of Chapter 11... well, May is going to be incredibly busy for me. This chapter's delay paid off for me, regarding college, but I didn't do well enough on my tests to take it easy for the rest of the semester, so... yeah. This is it for this month, but June and July will give me much more free time to work with. Still, I am not sure of how big Chapter 11 will be...

Depending on how lucky I get with the subjects I did worse on this first batch of tests, I could end up posting Chapter 11 on June 11th... but considering those two subjects are the kind to have four huge exercises with thousands of ways to mess up each and no room for error at all... you get the picture, right? The 18th is a much safer guess, but a lack of word count could bring the chapter earlier nonetheless.

Ah, who am I kidding here? Each time I think I will end up posting small chapters, I end up beating my word count record...

Well. In case anyone is wondering, Naruto missing the upper cabinets was, indeed, a dumb thing. But as ridiculous as it sounds, it is possible... my mom managed to do that when we moved into our newest house a year ago. She was like "well, it's a pity the kitchen doesn't have much space for our things" I thought it was sarcasm, because there was a lot of space, but it was not. She genuinely didn't see the huge cabinets that took up the entirety of two walls...

Anyways, special thanks this time go to _**Zorback32**_ and **SilentSambo88** for leaving a nice double recommendation to my fic on their own, which I spoke off in the last chapter (and in the case of the former, extra thanks for the posted review, too), and _Perentie Fan_ for prompting me to elaborate on the threat Kakashi made back in Chapter 7. And of course, SimplePotato for beta'ing this chapter, too! Thanks, mate!

If have any issues, ideas, doubts, questions, or words of encouragement, feel free to drop a review! Well... even if you don't, just reading this far already makes me happy, too, but I'd still like to hear from you guys. I didn't believe it at first, but reader reviews are what pays a fanfic writer's bills!

I'm sorry, that was horrible. I'll see myself out...

(PS: There was a minor plot point in this chapter that was "forgotten" partway through, but actually was addressed in a very subtle way. Can you discover what it is? You will need to deduce some stuff to find the answer, but be sure to test your luck if you drop a review!)


	11. Chapter 11 - Unexpected Tides

Hey... anyone still there?

Sorry for the delay, people. College blew up in my face and suffice to say that a 6-man project done solely by two people takes a huge chunk of time (and for nothing, since the damn thing had been wrong from step 1, and I only found out about it at the last minute. Time absolutely wasted...). That, and my beta had some problems too so there was a delay on his end for almost a week...

With that said, I have something important to ask of the people that reviewed my fic after the last update: check if your reviews actually got in if you were an anonymous guest reviewer. If you were a registered reviewer, simply see if I answered your reviews on your inbox. There's a chance they might not have been actually sent to the site, since it derped one time between the updates and I'm not sure how badly it truly was or how long it lasted.

I'm hoping some reviews actually failed to get through... going an entire month with just a single review (which I asked for since I was familiar with the reviewer) was a new, and not exactly thrilling experience. Karma for the delay, maybe? Yeah.

Also, two small responses to the guest reviewers that left actually understandable reviews and that I don't have contact with in Gamefaqs AND that have reviews that I actually can answer at this point.

Areving: Thank you for the great reviews! I'm glad you are liking the fic so much!

Guest that asked about more SasuHina interactions: Their schedules don't really coincide for most of what I have planned, but I will see what I can do.

And lastly, I just wanted to note that this chapter focuses more on plot/side-plot development than character interactions like the previous chapter.

That's it. Hope you guys enjoy!

* * *

 _Land of Waves Arc_

Chapter 11: Unexpected Tides (Current Version: 1.0.1)

* * *

After making a contract with Zabuza, Gatou temporarily lent to the jonin and his men a small hut deep within the forests of the Land of Waves's main island, which would serve as a small base for the band of missing-nin. The former Mist jonin didn't intend on staying for long, but the wounds he suffered during his fight with Kurenai and Kakashi, in addition to the stress of being put in a near-death state to fool both of them, forced him to spend more time than planned on the little house.

Zabuza was currently sleeping on a bed in one of the few rooms of the hideout. The room was completely empty, save for the aforementioned bed and a chair in which a girl was sitting, patiently waiting for her master's recovery. She had waited a full day already, knowing that this was around the time her brother had brought Zabuza "home" in the previous day, and it seemed she would need to wait much more.

The girl had long black hair flowing freely down her back, and wore a simple pink kimono decorated with purple swirls and a long white obi. Her chestnut-colored eyes were firmly trained on the slumbering form of her master, guarding over him as he slept.

Suddenly, the door opened. It barely made any noise, but it was enough to make Zabuza awaken and focus immediately, as if he had never been asleep at all. His eyes quickly scanned the room around him and, committing it and who the newcomers were to memory, he then kept his gaze firmly trained on the ceiling.

No threats were detected.

"Some jonin..." a middle-aged man muttered disdainfully as he entered the room, flanked by two katana-wielding bodyguards. While the bodyguards were dressed as common thugs, the man wore a sharp suit and accompanying pants, both of a black color that matched his sunglasses, but contrasted with his messy, medium-length graying blond hair.

He was none other than Gatou, Zabuza's client.

"This is the second time you have failed me, Zabuza," he stated calmly, yet with a clear edge of anger and annoyance beneath his tone. This didn't go undetected by Zabuza's companion, and the girl immediately rose from the chair to glare dangerously at the businessman when she heard his footsteps coming towards her master.

Immediately on guard, both bodyguards went for their swords, and the girl made sure to keep perfectly still in response. Gatou, however, continued walking on as if he owned the place. Which, incidentally, he did.

"Two days ago, it was because of your lousy subordinates, but now you went to do the job yourself and the bridge builder is still alive," Gatou spat. "Is this the fabled might of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist!? Feh! Simply pathetic..."

The insult yielded no reaction. Zabuza continued almost as still as a corpse, which also meant that he didn't spare a single glance to Gatou beyond the instant after he entered.

The mere idea that a lowly nobody ninja was ignoring him—dismissing his presence—angered Gatou, and on a whim, he moved even closer to Zabuza, intent on making the supposedly incapacitated shinobi pay attention to him... by force, if necessary.

"Now, what excuse do you have this time!?" The businessman demanded, outstretching his hand towards Zabuza. "If this is all you are capable of, then you will earn not a single coin from me!"

Just as the magnate was about to reach Zabuza's bandage mask, the girl caught his wrist, gripping it tightly with a strength and temperature that matched furious blizzard

"You will _not_ sully Zabuza-sama with your dirty hands!" she hissed, only barely restraining herself from breaking the hand she held. Gatou screamed, not just from the pain, but from fear. The ferocity in the girl's eyes made him want to escape her grasp as fast as possible lest he risk a certain, painful death.

But she didn't budge an inch, no matter how strongly he pulled.

With their charge in potential danger, the two swordsmen that entered with Gatou went for their blades... but just as they were almost drawing the katanas from their sheaths, both felt the cold edge of each other's weapon on their necks.

"Unless you want your throat to be slit, I recommend not moving," someone warned from behind them. The voice was somewhat feminine, but it clearly belonged to a male. Had the two bodyguards had the courage to look behind them, they would have seen a boy strikingly similar to the girl currently assaulting their employer.

"Zabuza-sama is only like this because YOU failed to give us the proper information!" The girl shouted, not budging an inch even though Gatou tried his hardest to get away from her. "The bridge builder hired two teams of genin, and that meant two jonin were protecting him as well!"

Following that sentence, Gatou's screens intensified as he felt his an intense sensation of blaze and frost on his hand. "R-release me at once! Unhand me!"

"Haru."

At her master's unspoken command, the girl begrudgingly released the man, but the fury her eyes refused to go away. Gatou, fearing for his life, took more than a few steps back while resisting the urge to cradle his wounded hand. The burns it got from the exposure to extreme cold would just become even more painful if he did that.

"In addition to the faulty information," Haku spoke up, letting go of the two katanas he held and throwing them to the floor, "the Konoha-nin had among them a group of genin capable of detecting ambushes from a safe distance, and one of the strongest jonin Konoha currently has is part of that team. Incidentally, he is also one of the few people in the world that would have been able to counter Zabuza-sama's silent killing style and is an accomplished tracker on his own right."

Having said that, the boy disappeared in a mist of leaves and reappeared beside the girl. Seeing them side-by-side told Gatou and his men that the two were closely related, only diverging in height and hairstyle (beyond gender differences, of course). But none of the three men paid enough attention to the siblings to register that much, and they promptly ran away... though Gatou had a few last things to say before getting out of there.

"Listen, I'm giving you one last chance! If you mess up again, you're out!" After saying his piece, Gatou left the room and used his good hand to slam the door of the bedroom. Two seconds later, he actually opened it again and decided to give the missing-nin another order.

"And if you are at such a disadvantage, bring those two stupid brats of yours to the battlefield! You clearly are too weak to kill those bastards on your own, so use your brain this time!"

Once again, the magnate slammed the door on his way out, leaving the three shinobi on their own.

"You shouldn't have interfered, Haru," Zabuza chastised, gripping a kunai he had hidden beneath the covers. "I am more than capable of handling business by myself."

Even though he was technically her superior, Haru still crossed her arms in front of her chest and confronted Zabuza head-on. "You said the same thing when you went alone to fight those Leaf ninja, and look how that played out."

"However," Haku intervened, knowing that Zabuza would have started to argue with her, "it would not do well to upset our clients, Haru-chan. Never mind trying to freeze his arm..."

"Hmph!" the girl looked away, clearly still feeling like she was in the right. "You didn't expect me to let him touch Zabuza-sama, did you?"

"No," the boy admitted with a sigh. He knew that Haru could get quite overbearing when it came to Zabuza, but he wished she were less violent about it. Still, that wasn't the only problem with his younger sister's actions. "But remember that he is the one paying us for this, Haru-chan. We will need a substantial amount to fund a mercenary force and later dethrone the Mizukage; you know this."

"Yeah... I'm sorry, Zabuza-sama, Haru-nii," she apologized, looking at the ground, and a small moment of silence followed before she spoke up again.

"...I still don't agree with this."

Zabuza narrowed his eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"This whole "revenge" against the Mizukage, what else!?" she spat, glaring fiercely at the swordsman, and then glancing at her older brother. "Come on, you two! Why can't we just forg—"

"This is not up for discussion," Zabuza cut her off. He already had heard that same speech quite a few times already and he had no wish to hear it once again.

"...Understood, Zabuza-sama." The girl gave up, and just sat down on her chair again, staring glumly at the floor. "I... just don't understand why you two can't let go of this..."

And in her ignorance Haru continued, as Zabuza simply closed his eyes again to signal the end of their conversation, and her brother decided to leave the room.

Once he was out, Haku firmly closed the door and leaned against it, sliding down until he was sitting on the floor. Releasing a breath of regret and with a heart heavy with guilt, he searched the inner pockets of his green robes and drew the mask he usually wore during missions.

The piece of chakra-enhanced steel stared back at him, reminding the boy of just why he kept fighting.

"I'm sorry, Haru..." he whispered to himself.

While Zabuza trained both of them, even if sometimes differently given their skillsets, Haru didn't often go out on missions thanks to her struggles to fight in a battlefield affected by the Kirigakure no Jutsu. As a result, she was usually left behind in whatever place Zabuza had them staying at for the night, waiting for her brother and master to return... despite knowing that there was a chance they might not.

Particularly notorious was one incident, almost a full year beforehand, when Haku and Zabuza were ambushed by a big squad of hunter-nin while both were out during a mission. The two managed to kill every single one of the Mizukage's ninja, but both were gravely wounded as a result. Thanks to their injuries, the pair took over a week to make their way back to the hideout, with some wounds partially healed and others in worse condition thanks to infections, and ever since their return, Haru kept trying to convince Zabuza and her brother to simply give up on their plans to usurp Yagura.

Haku merely though this was a result of her being worried for their safety after the incident, and while the girl had indeed been extremely worried... it was only a month later, when they were preparing to move out from that hideout to the next, that he discovered how deeply the event had affected his sister.

He really didn't intend on invading her privacy like he did; it was by complete accident that he dropped Haru's backpack and her diary stumbled out of it, opening in the process. But he had given in to the temptation and read a bit of the random page, figuring that what Haru didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

Now, Haku could barely stand the irony of that thought, because the pages he read were from that one week they were gone. His first finding was a bittersweet one, when he discovered that the girl wrote her diary entries as if she were writing simple letters to their departed mother. It brought a sad smile to Haku's face when he began reading, but it soon disappeared as he flipped through the pages.

The first two days or so, she only expressed her worries just as she usually did in person, and hoped that they would return soon between rants over some of the more annoying household chores... but as the days passed, the girl started to consider the possibility that they had truly gotten themselves killed. Had everything gone smoothly, the mission wouldn't have lasted more than a couple days, but more than a full week? It was impossible not to think that something happened to them.

Haku knew his sister had been crying over their absence. He and Zabuza actually caught her in the act when they returned, and as such, he wasn't terribly surprised when he noticed the last entry prior to their return had a few spots smudged and wrinkled from the tears that fell on the paper and eventually dried. But the contents of the last two pages are what truly got to him. He could still remember, even now, exactly what his sister had written that day...

* * *

 _Dear mother,_

 _Another day has passed, and they still haven't come back. It has been nine days since they left. Nine! I don't know what to do anymore!_

 _Something truly horrible must have happened to them... those bandits that Zabuza-sama was contracted to slay must have had more than a few missing-nin on their side. There's no other way to explain why such incredible shinobi like him and nii-san would take this long to come back._

 _I don't want to think about. I really don't want to think about it... but I'm starting to think they aren't going to return. That either they lost the fight or their wounds were too grave for them to return..._

 _Maybe it's the lack of sleep that is getting to me. I mean... I know you wouldn't be happy with me, but yesterday I couldn't sleep too. I've cleaned the hideout thoroughly everyday, and I definitely feel tired but I simply can't fall asleep. I know, this is the third day that this happened, but I want to be there when they come back. No, when they come back! Right? They will be tired and hungry... and they will need me to be there. You understand, don't you?_

 _...But I shouldn't have been here! I should've been there with them! I should've tried to get better at fighting in that stupid mist... and I know I'm not that good at this Ice Release just yet, but I still should've been there! I know that my powers could've been useful... but Zabuza-sama said I would only get in the way because that mission was too hard for me._

 _If only I was stronger... if I was as talented as nii-san is, then I know I could've been there to protect them. But no, I'm stuck here! I don't even know if they will be back! At least... at least if they died, I could've known it. This feeling of not knowing whether they are coming home is horrible..._

 _If they return, I will pester Zabuza-sama until he trains me harder. I know I can get the hang of my powers... and if I can get good enough, I can start to go on those harder missions to make sure to protect them. That's why I was born with this ability, right? I refuse to believe that I inherited you and dad's powers for no reason... but..._

 _But none of that will mean anything if they don't return. If... if that's the case, then what should I do, mom? What can I do?!_

 _I've always followed Zabuza-sama's orders without question, but... this means I don't know where the nearest village is. There's quite a lot of food in here, maybe enough to last me a few more weeks until the Demon Brothers return from their own mission. We could figure out what to do, then._

 _I... am not sure I will last that long, though. I'm hungry... it's been a couple days since I have last eaten anything. This is news to you, isn't it? Sorry, I didn't want to talk about it... but these past three days I simply can't enter that room. The kitchen... the one time I tried, I saw a knife on the counter and... I don't think I could stand to tell you what I thought at that moment. I know you wouldn't be pleased to hear it... I'm sorry, mom._

 _It's late. I just had the idea to try to sleep near the entrance so that I can maybe hear them coming. Maybe sleep will come to me this time... or maybe they will._

 _I'm not sure for how long I can still wait for them..._

* * *

After reading those two pages, Haku found himself unable to face his sister for quite a while. Merely looking at her hurt.

The only reason he and Zabuza had been so wounded, was because Haku took a nasty hit rather early on during the fight, forcing Zabuza to fight defensively to protect him. The jonin later argued that he would have needed the help to fend off the enemies, but was quite harsh in pointing out his apprentice's mistakes afterwards.

Haku knew Zabuza's methods well; the former commander of Kiri's assassination squad had little patience for mistakes, but he made sure that when one was made, that the lesson behind the error was well-learned. As such, Haku did his best to forget about his blunder as soon as he could... but then came the diary.

The thought that his actions almost caused his sister to kill herself was enough to make sure the shame and guilt would still haunt him for a long time. Nightmares where he and Zabuza returned home only to find Haru's bloody corpse, either with a nasty gash on the throat or a knife buried in her heart, would guarantee it.

Still... as much as it tormented the girl, even after she grew strong enough to take care of most missions they got, Haku knew that her wish for a peaceful life as far away as possible from the Land of Water couldn't be realized.

 _'As long as that madman still lives, there will always be hunters pursuing us.'_ Haku clenched his fist. _'The only way to find peace is to liberate Kiri... and to avenge our clan,'_ he reminded himself.

He, too, wanted to give up on this lifestyle. Neither Zabuza nor Haru had any remorse when killing people, but Haku detested it with all of his being, perhaps as a result of the incident that led to the first time he took lives.

The only thing he hated more than killing... was the Mizukage itself.

 _'For our clan... for mother... I won't stop. Not until that bastard dies. Not until I ruin him in the same way he ruined our family...!'_

And that, was a promise. An old promise, which he made to himself that day, many years ago, when everything changed for them.

They were just children back then... when their father discovered Haru's powers and killed their mother in cold blood, fearing the Ice Release bloodline. The girl witnessed their mother's death and fainted, but not before screaming as loudly as she could, which was the only reason Haku managed to arrive in time to rescue her from their terrified father.

They fled, but it wasn't long before their once-loving father rallied the other villagers and cornered them. Desperate, Haku called upon the power that his mother had advised him to keep hidden... and in an uncontrollable burst of chakra, killed all of the people that were after him and Haru.

The event traumatized him deeply, but his sister didn't come unscathed out of it either. The mental shock of seeing her mother's murder was too much for the young girl's psyche, and the innocent child didn't remember a single thing about the incident after she woke up.

Haku was immensely glad for that, but it meant the burden of telling her what happened fell onto his shoulder. It was painful, recounting his mother's death... and at the time he did not name who her murderer had been.

But at the end, while crying desperately over the death of their mother, the young girl asked two simple questions that almost destroyed him on the inside.

 _'Nii-chan... where's daddy? H-he's alright, isn't he?!'_

He simply didn't have the heart to tell her the truth. Haru and their father had been extremely close, almost to the point where Haku felt jealousy towards her. The man had been her hero... and as much as he ended up dying as a villain, Haku couldn't find it in himself to crush the girl's beliefs like that, not when he had to live with the guilt of having killed their father personally.

Instead of the cruel truth, he managed to tell her that their father also had special powers. In his lie, their father gave his life to protect them from the villagers, later elaborating that he died from chakra exhaustion after summoning gigantic ice spears to save them from certain death. What really happened, though...

 _'Monsters! I'll kill you... I will kill all of you!'_

The reality behind him throwing away his father's surname to, instead, be called Haku Yuki—in honor of the persecuted clan that his mother had been born to—was something he'd bring with himself to the grave. His sister followed without complaining, thinking that this was her father's last wish...

The irony never escaped Haku.

He didn't want his sister to be taken over by the same bitterness that kept him going forward, every day. The same emptiness that took upon him ever since that incident, that now didn't even allow for a single tear to fall down when he remembered his father's final words.

The last thing the man had ever said, beyond the strained, bloody gurgle after his whole torso was impaled by a spear of ice.

Perhaps, in the end, he had been right to call them monsters...

* * *

It was about eight in the morning when Kakashi and the genin that composed Teams 7 and 8 arrived in the same clearing they had spent the entirety previous day in. It was the same as they had left it, with multiple trees sporting kunai marks and a few small craters, and a thin line of dried blood on the grass where a certain Naruto Uzumaki accidentally cut himself in a training accident.

Had Kakashi decided to end their training session only a couple minutes earlier, however, there would be a small but significant difference between how the area would have looked like then: a single slash mark, found at the very top of the tree one Hinata Hyuuga had spent the whole day climbing.

Unlike Sasuke Uchiha who (almost) always easily succeeded at whatever he set out to do with relative ease, Hinata wasn't used to this feeling of success. It was enough to keep a small, silly smile plastered on her face throughout the remainder of the day, even though she could barely move given how tired and sore she was.

(It did help that if Sakura's words were to be believed, she wasn't doing as badly as she thought when the subject was Naruto, though...)

An entire night of rest greatly alleviated the pains of the previous day's training, but it did little to quell her happiness. Kakashi had given her a look of approval, one that she had seen a few times but never directed solely at her... and Kurenai also looked distinctively impressed that both herself and Sakura were able to complete their training within a single day.

Now, one day later, the girl stood before her training partner. She felt a little bad for the tree—many forms of life would make use of the kunai wounds the plant endured—but it didn't manage to make her any less accomplished and, oddly, proud of herself. Tree climbing was, after all, supposed to be difficult even for an experienced ninja.

But... was that enough for one supposed to be the heiress of the Hyuuga clan? Would her father be proud too, or at the very least satisfied with her performance? Or perhaps she, as a Hyuuga, was supposed to have been able to conquer that exercise much faster than she did? Maybe the fact that a mere civilian had beaten her would make her own performance irrelevant to his eyes...

"Alright kids, here's how we are going to work today," Kakashi started speaking suddenly, snapping Hinata out of her thoughts. "Shino, Sakura, Hinata. You three already have a good understanding of how to use and control your chakra, so you will get a more advanced lesson on ninjutsu from me."

"So, no more spars?" Sakura asked, remembering how she essentially spent three hours fighting Shino with barely any breaks, with kikaichu and genjutsu banned to simulate what they would be able to work with when Zabuza returned. It was a pure physical workout, and Sakura was still a bit sore even after a nice rest.

"Not until after the lunch break," the jonin answered, and then motioned towards the three genin he hadn't named yet. "As for you three, same thing as yesterday. Any questions?"

Naruto's hand rose immediately. "What are you going to teach them, Kakashi-sensei? Is it going to be a cool jutsu!?"

The genin's eagerness made Kakashi eye-smile at him. "Get to the top of the tree and you will find out!"

Naruto's pout, Kiba patting the miffed blond on the shoulder and Sasuke snorting in fake disinterest were the last Hinata saw of the three before Kakashi ushered herself and her colleagues towards another part of the forest, though she still heard Naruto's whine about how it was "totally not fair".

They did not go very far away from the other "team", just enough to hear the few swears and groans of annoyance that the more outgoing boys of the trio let out now and then. As it turned out, the area where they stopped was a smaller clearing, with a lone tree stump that Kakashi made good use of as a chair, albeit with some difficulty due to his crutches.

"Well then," Kakashi began motioning for his students to sit on the grass in front of him afterwards. "My previous lecture on chakra ended on a very interesting point that I'd like to continue talking about now."

 _ **'YOUR lecture?! How dare you?! It was MY lecture on chakra, you lazy good-for-nothing teacher! I'll sue you!'**_ Sakura raged internally; the small twitch of her eye being the only evidence of her inner anger.

As the pinkette took a second to regain her mental composure, Shino replayed the end of her lecture on his head and quickly understood what the jonin referred to. "Do you perhaps intend on teaching us about nature transformation?"

"That's exactly where I was going, yes," Kakashi confirmed. "Mastering the process of transforming your normal chakra into elemental chakra is not easy, and is something most ninja only ever attempt after they become chunin. However, as my classes deal with ninjutsu, part of the program includes teaching you techniques that you would be able to make good use of. Determining your elemental nature is the first step towards it, in my opinion, so this is why we will be broaching this topic so early in your careers."

"I guess Naruto got it right for once," Sakura commented with a smirk. "We really will be learning "cool justu", huh?"

"Hmm... not exactly," Kakashi denied. "Considering our current circumstances, unless one of you turns out to be a genius at nature manipulation, you won't be managing to learn any jutsu from me while we are still in this country. It would certainly be a blessing, since you three specifically will be greatly hindered by Zabuza's technique... but the focus of your training during the week will be in taijutsu, not ninjutsu."

"T-then... why teach us this?" Hinata questioned timidly; sheer curiosity easily winning over her shyness in this case.

"To tell the truth, this is mostly to ensure the Hokage's project won't be canceled when we get back..." the silver-haired man confessed. "But you will be taking turns sparring with each other throughout the next few days, so this will give you a productive thing to do during breaks. Physical spars won't require you to use any substantial amount of chakra and this will help to take your chakra control to the next level."

"With all due respect, Kakashi-sensei," Shino interrupted, "if the intent is to further improve our chakra control, wouldn't it be far more productive for you to teach us the water walking technique?"

"A fair point," Kakashi conceded. "That technique is generally what shinobi move on to after learning to walk on trees, but our little lesson here also doubles as a little extra incentive for your other teammates to finish their task." The jonin sported his usual eye-smile as he said that, but it quickly vanished as he continued to talk. "That, and just working on chakra control won't do any good for you three specifically. Zabuza's Kirigakure no Jutsu will strip you of your greatest abilities, or in Hinata's case, greatly impair them. Training an element to master a jutsu can have a relevant payoff to our team if you succeed, but just chakra control will not."

Finding the man's logic to be sound, the Aburame nodded at the leader of Team 7 who then continued to talk. "I believe that this is enough about the "whys", so let's actually get to the lesson."

Seeing his students were all playing attention, Kakashi cleared his throat and began. "Nature transformation is one of the two ways to change the properties of chakra and allow you to access all sorts of techniques of a level that normal chakra would never allow you to achieve. The learning process, though, requires a lot of time, effort, and patience until you are able to find the desired results... but before we begin talking about our training proper, I want to teach you about the five basic natures, their advantages, disadvantages, properties and relationships with each other."

"B-but, there are more than j-just five elements... right?" Hinata interrupted, albeit a bit reluctantly given her unfamiliarity with the man. "O-our Shodaime... he had the wood release ability, if I'm not mistaken."

"Indeed, but elements such as those are very much like your Byakugan: bloodline limits" Kakashi explained, pointing at the young Hyuuga's eyes. "The basic elements can be learned and mastered by anyone that puts in enough time and hard work, but there are other elements that combine two kinds of elemental chakra... which can only be used if you are born with such a rare kind of chakra."

Kakashi knew, however, that this was a lie. The rogue student of Sarutobi Hiruzen, Orochimaru, had managed to cultivate and experiment with the Shodaime Hokage's genetic material and successfully implanted the bloodline in one test subject. Ultimately, it proved that it was possible to circumvent your body's limits... and also proved that the process is extremely unreliable, as the experiment killed off all but one of the many children the deranged sannin had used.

"So, back to what you three could actually make use of. Which one do you guys want me to talk about first?"

"Fire!" Sakura blurted out, before sparing an embarrassed glance at the two members of Team 8 that sat beside her. "Err, if that's alright with you guys..."

"I have no objections," Shino stated, drowning a mumble that was probably Hinata's soft-spoken "okay". Not due to Aburame's being loud, but because he was sitting between the two girls

"Fire it is, then." Kakashi agreed. "Fire is one of the three offensive-oriented elements and is the most common of them all—in particular in our homeland. Katon techniques are very all-around, having good speed, good range, good strength and reasonably low chakra cost while being simpler in execution when compared to other elements. Its attacks are debilitating, burning skin and melting chain mail to cause constant pain and to ensure the victim's chances of survival are lowered even by glancing blows... but there's also a pretty big risk in sticking with Fire. Can any of you three guess what it is?"

The genin spent a few seconds thinking, but ultimately came up without an answer, so Kakashi took pity on them and proceeded.

"The downfall of Fire-specialists is in how their attacks are at a disadvantage when facing the other kinds of elemental ninjutsu. Fire has a natural weakness to Water, generally doesn't manage to overpower Earth, has less speed and strength than Lighting, and while they do have an advantage against Wind, that one is the rarest of all five elements. Many seasoned ninja outside of the Wind Country have never fought a Fuuton user"

"So Sasuke-kun is in danger if he doesn't learn any other techniques..." Sakura muttered to herself, ignoring the last bit about Wind completely. Suddenly, learning about one of the things that made her crush special wasn't as cool as she had initially presumed.

"Fire is still a good element, but yes, Sasuke can be outmatched by other ninjutsu specialists," the jonin confirmed. "My plan for Sasuke is to train him on a second element once we return... and what element do you think that will be?"

This time, an answer came right away.

"You will teach Sasuke how to use the element that overpowers his current weakness," Shino said confidently. "As Fire can be defeated by Water, he will be taught the element that defeats Water... and in this case, it could be either Lighting or Earth."

"Exactly," Kakashi confirmed. "Lighting is also my specialty, so that's what I was planning to teach Sasuke. Lighting is the most offensive-oriented element, with techniques that have a superior speed and strength to any other element, and a combination of piercing and paralyzing effects in its jutsu that makes it the most dangerous kind of ninjutsu you could be up against. However, it's also the most difficult element to use, requiring both an excellent chakra control and big reserves to do anything significant with it. In regards to other elements, it is in the exact opposite case of Fire: It's offensively superior to it, can easily overpower Earth, makes using Water an extremely dangerous risk due to its conductive nature, and its one weakness is the rarest element of them all."

 _'Hopefully none of us have that element,'_ Hinata thought, dreading the possibility. Given the apparent difficulty in using Raiton jutsu, it was practically certain that they wouldn't be able to advance in their training fast enough to contribute to their current mission if that were to be their affinities. Still, despite that, there was another thing nagging at her as she listened to the explanations so far.

"And... what about Wind?" The fact that it was supposedly so rare made the blunette wonder what kind of secret the Fuuton techniques could be hiding.

The jonin faced her and began his speech. "Wind, the last of the three offensive elements, is focused on range. Its techniques are extremely hard to dodge due to the area they cover and their modest speed, but their damage output is generally lower than the previous two types, even if the cutting properties of Wind chakra can come in handy now and then. In compensation, it's the most effective element at close-quarters combat, having quite a few potent short range techniques. Chakra-wise, it has a versatile array of techniques that can focus either on control or on output, but learning how to use wind to begin with requires good control. It has mild difficulty in beating the defensive types, and being beaten by the most common kind of elemental ninjutsu isn't a great thing but... Lighting is almost just as common, and having an advantage against that is nothing to sneeze at. The unfamiliarity people have against Wind is also noteworthy."

"And if Lighting, Fire, and Wind are the offensive elements..." Sakura began, "Then Water and Earth are the defensive types, right?"

"Right. Unlike the others, these two elements don't usually work on pure chakra: they manipulate solid forms that are hard for physical attacks to break through, and they have unique properties that give them slight chakra-resistant effects... to the point where the combination of these two natures—the Mokuton we previously mentioned—can drain chakra even without contact. But talking about them individually... let's begin with Earth.

"Earth techniques are generally the superior ones in defense, while possessing a reasonable power behind its attack techniques. Doton jutsu does have a glaring weakness against Lighting, but it can be counted on to protect you against all of the other elements with ease. The problem with it is that Earth jutsu are comparatively slow, so to make up for that, there's a variation of Doton manipulation lets you use mud, trading some of its power and resilience for faster techniques and giving you a range of support abilities too."

"Wait, mud?" Sakura interrupted. "Don't you need water to do that?"

"Yes, and that's the key. Mud attacks are nothing more than a person using Earth chakra to manipulate liquids. The resulting mud is much thicker than normal water, so it requires more chakra and control from the user, but if you need the speed and can't use Water techniques to begin with, it can be worth it."

"...If manipulating water with Earth chakra creates mud, then what happens when manipulating earth with Water chakra?" Shino inquired.

"You'd just extract whatever remains of liquid there are on the surface you chose or nothing at all." Kakashi explained. "Though now that we are on topic, well... Water techniques don't depend as much on a substance to be formed, as one can convert chakra into Water just from taking a little of water vapor present in the air or a minimal share of water from our bodies. Sometimes even from urine."

"Ew," Sakura held her tongue out, and Hinata failed to hide the expression of disgust on her face. Kakashi wanted to remind them that a ninja must use every tool at their disposal in order to survive, but his lecture was getting long enough already, so he simply overlooked it and proceeded.

"Though Suiton techniques lack in power when compared to other natures, that weakness can be rectified when the user has plenty of water around them, allowing one to greatly increase their technique's power and range while keeping the advantages of Water: flexibility, low chakra cost, and speed. All in all, Water can be weaker offensively but it has the widest range of techniques of a support and defensive nature when compared to other elements, allowing the user to perform a great variety of roles within a squad. As far as interactions with other elements go, Water almost never is able to overpower Earth without having a natural source such as a river or lake to increase the technique's strength. Raiton techniques simply use the water's conductive nature to boost themselves, so it's a bad match-up too. Wind and Fire, on the other hand, can be counted to fail against Water most of the time."

 _'Well, I hope I don't have THAT affinity,'_ Sakura mused. Being so dependent on the environment in order to provide enough offensive power when necessary didn't appeal to her, despite how the element seemed to be the best fit for a support role. That, and being potentially forced to use her own urine...

Shino, however, was considering the unique benefits he'd have with that element. _'Fire and Wind are the biggest threats to my kikaichu, but Water could help me cover for them when I require an opening. Perhaps there is merit to learning Suiton regardless of my affinity...'_

"Lastly," Kakashi continued, "there are two specific cases where an elemental weakness can be useful to the ninja: Wind's weakness to Fire and Water's weakness to Lighting. While the enemy can exploit your weakness, these same elemental interactions can be used among teammates to increase the strength of the stronger element, be it by fueling the flames of a Katon jutsu or expanding the range and changing the direction of a Raiton jutsu. Also, it is worth nothing that a Wind user paired with an Earth user could make a perfect defensive formation given that Doton stops all but Lighting, which can in turn be countered by Fuuton. And... that's it"

Yawning freely behind his mask, Kakashi was truly glad that he got stuck with these three specifically. All of them liked to learn new things, even if just in theory, and they paid attention to his every word. Sasuke probably would have lost his patience by now if given the same lecture, and Kakashi wasn't sure if he'd ever get to say all of it with Naruto or Kiba around, given the amount of things he wanted to cover and their restless personalities.

Still, that didn't change the fact that the same lecture would need to be given to those three one day. Being aware of how each element interacts with the others and what to expect when fighting ninjutsu specialists was something the academy didn't teach, given how genin almost never dabble in elemental jutsu. The students were expected to do their own research after promoting to chunin, but nothing would beat the hands-on experiences of someone that spent many years fighting against and using all five kinds of elements.

Finally, the jonin drew three small slips of paper from his breast pocket and walked with a little difficulty towards the genin, handing two of the thin white squares to Sakura and Shino and keeping the last one for himself

"These papers here are extremely sensitive to chakra, and they react to the element your chakra is naturally attuned to. That element is called your "affinity", and manipulating it will come easier than the other four elements, both in terms of control and chakra output," the jonin explained. "It burns away for Fire, become completely soaked if Water, crumbles if Earth, splits in half with Wind, and crumples with Lighting. You just need to focus a bit of chakra on your fingertips and the paper will react after a couple seconds—watch."

Kakashi held the paper between his pointer and middle finger and sent his chakra through it. Instants later, it crumpled completely. "Like I said, Lighting. Now do it yourselves and let's see where we can go from here."

 _'Amazing...! Now, let's see what I can get out of this,'_ Sakura thought to herself, feeling the familiar spark of curiosity that needed to be sated that always accompanied an interesting lecture. She, however, didn't even manage to send her chakra to the paper before Shino spoke up.

"That was enlightening, but might I ask why haven't you offered a piece to my teammate?"

Turning her head, Sakura noticed that Hinata didn't have a slip of her own, and sported an expression that reeked of indecisiveness. The young Hyuuga didn't know whether she should have voiced her concerns, given that Kakashi always seemed to have a reason for the things he did, and as it turned out, she was correct.

"Because it's pointless," Kakashi clarified flatly. "Hinata's affinity is Lighting just like me and everyone else on her clan."

"...It is?" said girl blurted out without thinking, surprised. She knew that her clan has a few Raiton scrolls in the clan libraries, given only to the Hyuuga's strongest warriors. Some of them were also required to be learned by the clan head's first child, as part of the rituals that happen when the title is passed from parent to child. However, she thought it was just a tradition, much like Katon was—or perhaps had been—for the Uchiha.

"I've had the pleasure of working with many ninja during my career, including your parents, and I know that both of them had the affinity for Lighting, much like your entire clan," Kakashi said, remembering how Hiashi didn't take well to his usual three-hour delays. Also, it was hard to not forget Hikari, Hinata's mother, excitedly commenting about how she couldn't wait to master that element to apply it to her arrows.

She had been having trouble with the process and asked him for some tips, since she didn't want to make the clan think lowly of her because of that weakness and thus couldn't ask anyone in her clan for help. As she had been courting Hiashi at the time, and as one of the few Hyuuga ninja that took up a different path than the Gentle Fist, she couldn't afford such a thing.

Kakashi had thought it was an interesting coincidence that he'd also end up assisting Hikari's daughter with the same subject, but as it turned out...

"What!? I-Is this true?"

Kakashi regarded her with a "were you truly unaware of this?" look he usually reserved for Naruto. "Your father told this to me myself. And it is a necessity for you Hyuuga after all—Gentle Fist strikes glow a bright blue to my Sharingan, just like Raiton jutsu. Much like your dojustu, this affinity is in the blood of your entire clan."

"I... see..." Hinata muttered. This discovery practically ensured she'd remain useless in the coming fight, and that fact worried her... but being honest with herself, a more childish part of her was also looking forward to seeing how the paper would react to her chakra.

Kakashi easily saw the disappointment on the shy Hyuuga's face, and on a whim, decided that there was no harm in letting her see it out for herself.

"But here," the jonin said, handing the girl a slip of the chakra-sensitive paper. "I have a few spares, so feel free to use one if you wish."

Accepting the offer despite not seeing much point in it, Hinata took a moment to examine the paper. Exerting a little pressure on it, she found out that the paper was very hard and inflexible, and that it was unlikely that it would crumple so much without a decent bit of force.

 _'Why didn't anyone tell me this?'_ she wondered. Given her position as the heiress of the Hyuuga clan, this detail about the Jyuuken should have been taught to her at some point. _'But... father never even bothered.'_

"Oh, look! It crumbled!" Sakura exclaimed excitedly, showing a small amount of brown powder on her hand.

"As did mine," Shino stated, displaying his hand and a similar quantity of dirt on his palm.

"Well, looks like you two got lucky," Kakashi smiled at them, a fact only barely evidenced by how his eye accompanied the motion. "Both myself and Kurenai use Earth, so getting to learn it will be much easier than the other affinities. So, let's move on to... what?"

Though Kakashi was looking at Sakura and Shino, his peripheral vision allowed him to see Hinata holding a little something that shouldn't be possible...

A piece of paper completely drenched in water, which was dripping a few bits of water on her lap.

"...Water?" The girl whispered to herself, shocked.

"Wasn't it supposed to react like yours, Kakashi-sensei?" Sakura questioned, eyeing the once dry paper Hinata held.

"It was... I don't understand this," the man muttered. _'Could that have been a defective paper? Hell, can this thing even be defective...?'_

"If Hinata's parents truly had Lighting affinity, then this shouldn't have been possible," Shino commented frowning.

The rest of the group turned to the Aburame in confusion, who found himself forced to elaborate. "As you all might have guessed, genetics is an important field of research for my clan. As such, I was required to read books on this and other subjects, and according to them, a person cannot be born with Lighting affinity unless that trait was present in both inherited genes. Thus, if both father and mother have that affinity, it is statistically impossible for their child to be born with any other affinity."

And yet, despite his words, the living exception to the research found in his books was there, with the evidence to contradict what years of breeding bugs and testing humans yielded. It was a fascinating mystery for Shino... much like the expression of utter terror that the boy saw on Hinata's face when he looked up from the paper the girl held.

 _'This... can't be!'_

"Hinata?"

 _'Does... does this mean I'm not my father's child? I mean, here's no way my mom isn't my mom given how rare my hair color is in the Hyuuga clan but... or... is this a mutation? Kakashi-sensei just said the Jyuuken used Lighting... but if my affinity is Water then—!'_

"Hey, Hinata!"

"Ah!? What? W-what is it!?" she stuttered out in confusion, not knowing why Sakura was calling her.

"You didn't respond when Shino called you..."

"Is everything alright?" Shino questioned after Sakura trailed off, all while Kakashi watched the interaction cautiously.

"I'm sorry, and... I'm fine," Hinata mumbled, averting her eyes to the ground.

Sakura frowned. "You didn't look fine."

"B-but I am!" The Hyuuga insisted, reestablishing eye contact as a bit of panic seeped into her words. "There's nothing... wrong with me. I'm fine."

Shino and Sakura shared a glance, feeling as if Hinata had been trying to convince herself rather than them.

"Indeed, there's nothing wrong with her... and in fact, it's the exact opposite," Kakashi confirmed, drawing the attention of the genin to him. The man was staring at Hinata with his single visible eye, and there was a hint of disappointment on the look he was giving her. A bit too subtle for Shino or Sakura to catch, but Hinata had far too much experience with that kind of situation to miss it.

Still, his last words were curious enough to make Hinata question him. "W-what do you mean?"

"Trying to convert normal chakra into an element takes a big toll on your reserves if you haven't undergone the proper training. This strain is reduced if you have an affinity for that element, but this wasn't the case with you. Remember what happened during the bell test?"

Hinata's pale eyes widened as she understood the meaning of his words.

"So, if I understand correctly, you mean to say that the cost of the technique Hinata attempted was multiplied because she hasn't an affinity for Lighting?" Shino spoke, testing his theory.

"Exactly," Kakashi nodded. "And the fact that what she attempted cost a decent amount of chakra to begin with is what made her fall unconscious The process of converting that much chakra to an element she didn't have the affinity for was a bit too much for her reserves, hence the fainting."

Grabbing a scroll from his breast pocket, Kakashi continued. "Luckily, this shouldn't get in the way of practicing the Gentle Fist, so this is nothing we need to worry about until we return home. And before we arrive in Konoha, there's still a lot to be done, so let's get started."

 _'...He's right,'_ Hinata realized, barely absorbing the explanation she had been just given. _'This is not the time to think about this.'_

Dwelling on her fears was not going to help her survive this mission, so she'd need to forget her worries for the time being. They'd only be relevant if she returned to Konoha alive and healthy, after all.

The scroll Kakashi carried had the materials need for the Lighting and Water elemental training equipment. As it turned out, the other three elements could be practiced with just with things they had around them: leaves for Fire and Wind, and a patch of soil for Earth.

While Kakashi explained to Shino and Sakura how they were supposed to mold soil with just their chakra, Hinata opened the scroll Kakashi gave her to unseal the items she would be using, as instructed. To do so, she placed her hand over the painted kanji for "water" and sent a burst of chakra into it, much like she had done for the paper before.

 _'Let's see. Two small bowls, a big bottle of water and a wider bowl that can fit both of the smaller ones. Hmm... what could this training be?'_ Hinata asked herself, staring curiously at the plastic bottle and the brown ceramic of the bowls.

She had to remain in doubt for only a minute, as Kakashi approached her as soon as he was done with the other two.

"Alright, as for you," the jonin said as he got closer. "First, put the smaller bowls inside the bigger one, with a little distance between them, and fill one of the small ones with the water on the bottle".

"Right." Nodding once, Hinata quickly did as she was instructed, taking care not to spill the liquid. "Is this okay?"

"It will do. Now, your actual training is to transport the water from one small bowl to the other. Your training will be complete only when you can transfer all of it in one go. Activate your Byakugan and watch." The man waited for the girl to activate her dojutsu, and once all seals were done, he started the demonstration.

Hinata watched carefully as Kakashi focused his chakra on his right palm, and then released it towards the bowl. The chakra soon made contact with the water and spread through the liquid, until it covered the entire bowl. He then moved his hand upwards, and the water followed his command wholly.

 _'Incredible! It even retained the bowl's shape!'_ Hinata thought, awed. An observer would not need to be a mind reader to understand that, however, as her gaping mouth and wide eyes told the entire tale.

A straight motion to the side carried the floating water in the same direction until it was hovering above the second bowl. Slowly, Kakashi broke the connection between his chakra and the water, pouring the latter on the previously empty container.

"It looks like you just swapped them!"

"Doesn't it?" Kakashi smirked beneath his mask. "If you check the bowl you filled, you will see there is not a single drop of water on it.

Hinata could not resist it and zoomed in. "A-amazing! It's completely dry!"

"In short, just place your hand above the water, fill it with chakra, and move said chakra to the other bowl by using your hand. Just don't expect to get more than a few drops in your first tries, and place your hands as close as you can to the water's surface. You are also probably going to drop most of it while trying to move between the bowls, but that's why we have the bigger one. Refill the bowl when you need to."

With the explanations done, the jonin walked away to catch up with his book and Hinata began her training.

 _'Alright, first I send the chakra into the water and fill it,'_ she instructed herself, placing her hand as close to the water as she could without actually making contact. After a few seconds, her chakra consumed the entirety of the bowl, and slowly, the girl moved her hand upwards.

Only a single drop of water obeyed her.

Discouraged but not defeated, she attempted to move the lone drop to the other bowl... but her control over the chakra within the liquid slipped, leaving that drop to fall on the edge of the ball. A fraction of the water slipped back into the small bowl, while the rest ultimately ended up sliding on the outside of the bowl until it reached the surface of the wider one.

 _'Hngh... this will be harder than I thought.'_ The girl frowned. _'But I mustn't give up! I managed to reach to top of the tree yesterday so... I just have to keep at it!'_

And thus Hinata tried again and again, unaware of the furtive glances Sakura and Shino shot at her as they eventually begun conversing between themselves, keeping their tone low as to not be overheard.

"Something is up with Hinata," Sakura whispered as she practiced the exercise Kakashi had demonstrated. The thick block of hardened earth that sat between them was not at all similar to the small, almost triangular patch of earth that she had managed to push from the ground with the power of her chakra. "That expression she had... I don't know what that meant, but it worries me."

"Agreed," Shino concurred, frowning at his equally pathetic manipulation of the soil. It wasn't even 5% of what Kakashi had shown them. "I believe it would be prudent to inform Kurenai-sensei of what is happening."

"...I'm not really sure about that," Sakura retorted, remembering how awkward her conversation with Kurenai had been.

"You might be unaware of this," Shino began, "but Kurenai-sensei had already been training with Hinata for quite some time prior to our graduation. I think if someone can get the truth from Hinata, it is her."

"...Okay, fine. It's not like we have any other choices" the pinkette backed off. _'Maybe I'm just being biased,'_ she thought, remembering the care the older kunoichi displayed when tending to Hinata the other day. The Genjutsu Mistress had started on the wrong foot with Team 7, but she had a much closer relationship to the small Hyuuga.

"Perhaps then she might be willing to talk to us..."

And while Hinata was just a few feet away from the duo, unaware of her fellow genin's conversation, Kakashi sat at a much farther distance. Still, his trained ears and eye were more than enough for him to understand what Sakura and Shino were planning.

 _'I guess she will learn this the hard way... well, I did warn her.'_ Shooting one last look at Hinata, who was fully immersed in her training, Kakashi went back to his book. "Now, where were we...?"

* * *

The sun had been close to setting when the trio of genin under Kakashi's guidance returned to their temporary home. Their sensei wasn't with them, since he had the hard task of convincing the other trio of genin to stop climbing trees for the day.

With that in mind, even though they were a bit sore from all the time they spent sparring with each other after the lunch break, Shino, Sakura, and Hinata decided to make use of their crippled sensei's absence to rush home as fast as they could. The promise of a hot bath and a warm plate of food was worth the pain.

As it turned out, Tazuna and Kurenai were already inside when they arrived, conversing with Tsunami in the kitchen while the latter was busy preparing dinner.

This was a conclusion Hinata arrived at merely by hearing the voices and noises coming from that room. At first, she had intended on going inside to greet the adults and take a peek at what Tsunami was cooking, but Sakura quickly stood between her and the doorway, effectively blocking her path.

"You know, you spent the whole day with that bulky coat, so why don't you go have a bath first?"

Not really having any reasons to object, besides sheer confusion, the bluenette decided to accept the weirdly worded offer and went upstairs right away.

"Besides, she has a point," Hinata conceded to herself once she was alone in Tsunami's bedroom, as she rummaged through her backpack in search of her bathing supplies and clothing. Her coat did a good job of protecting her from the cold, but the moderately warm weather added to the constant physical exercise she went through... made wearing it become very unpleasant as time passed.

It would be simple to take it out before it became an issue, but walking around with sweat stains was uncomfortable enough when nobody was there so see them... which didn't matter much in the end, as a bath and a fresh set of clothes (even if it also had _another_ tan coat) solved that problem easily.

Roughly twenty minutes after she entered the house, now fully clean, Hinata made her way down and once again tried to enter the kitchen.

"Excuse... oh!" The girl froze in surprise, not really expecting a change in the room's occupants. Tazuna and Tsunami were still there, the former sitting by the table and the latter working near the sink. But instead of Kurenai, Shino and Sakura... the only other people in the room were the three male members of Team 7.

"Oh hey, it's Hinata! Hi!" Naruto exclaimed, waving in greeting.

"Afternoon, girlie," Tazuna called out to her, while Sasuke and Kakashi just glanced at her. The Uchiha did nod at her once their gazes met, though.

"H-hello," Hinata said, shyly approaching the table and sitting beside Sasuke, who in turn was sitting beside Kakashi and across from Naruto.

"Dinner is almost ready," Tsunami informed her while searching for a small towel to dry her hands. "I'm going to tell the other girl—Sakura-chan, was it?—that the bath is free. Though I guess she might as well eat first at this point..."

Hinata was just about to offer to go in her stead and maybe apologize for not being brief enough in the bathroom, when she remembered a key fact. "Um, where is everyone else...?"

"Your sensei was practically dragged by pinky and the bug boy; dunno where they went," Tazuna stated with a shrug. Obviously, he didn't know, and he didn't care.

"That happened right when we got here," Naruto added thoughtfully. "Shino had Kiba tag along for some reason. I think they are in our room..."

"I wonder what they could be talking about..." Kakashi said in a tone that implied he knew what was going on, all while giving Hinata a rather unnerving glance for a couple seconds before turning away and resuming his conversation with Tazuna.

It left Hinata feeling that perhaps she should have known what was happening with Sakura and the rest of her team, too...

* * *

It didn't take much longer for dinner to begin. Inari arrived from school almost at the same time as Tsunami brought back her other guests for dinner.

Hinata felt a little guilty about Sakura's situation. The pinkette hadn't had time to take her bath and was going to end up eating her dinner while sweaty and dirty. Perhaps, if her newfound ability to manipulate water hadn't childishly distracted her, she could have finished bathing fast enough for Sakura to have her turn, but... well. She didn't seem to mind, so Hinata just focused on her food.

For the most part. It was pretty hard not to stare at how the genin she didn't train with that day were inhaling their dinner as fast as possible, spilling food carelessly and making a huge mess. Hinata actually expected this behavior from Kiba and Naruto already, but seeing the usually composed and stoic Sasuke Uchiha swallowing his dinner like a starved ogre was certainly surprising.

Another surprise was that the other adults didn't seem to mind. Well, Kakashi obviously wouldn't have cared at all, and it would be a little hypocritical of Tazuna to complain—or perhaps hippo critical, the girl remembered with a small smile—but Tsunami and Kurenai both were also ignoring how the boys were behaving.

Their host seemed actually flattered by how much her food had been well received, but the bluenette only understood the reason behind her sensei's silence when she saw the woman's expression after Kiba started choking.

The Inuzuka had the misfortune of sitting right beside Sakura, who also hadn't been too pleased with the boys's lack of manners, but seemingly opted for silence as nobody else objected to it. The way she "helped" Kiba by hitting his back told enough of the pinkette's opinion, but Sakura still felt the need to verbalize it.

"See? That's what happens when you eat that fast. Slow down—and that goes for both of you as well!" She snarled, pointing at her teammates. Her anger was mostly aimed at Naruto and Kiba, as her gaze shifted merely to a vibe of disappointment when her eyes landed on the Uchiha.

The silent "I expected better of you" was enough for Sasuke to stop completely. Hinata had the impression the boy even _flinched_ at that time and broke eye contact almost immediately. Even though she had watched the whole exchange mostly just with her peripheral vision, it reminded Hinata of how conversations with her father usually went.

 _'Perhaps... he has been through something similar in the past? Well, he wasn't the heir, but I suppose his father had high expectations for him, especially having a brother as talented as Itachi Uchiha. Hmm...'_

Beyond that, dinner had been uneventful until the very end, when Tsunami served tea to everyone after their meals. Sakura ended up finishing it first, and after she brought her used cup to Tsunami, on the sink, the girl only had one thing in mind.

 _'Well, off to that sweet, sweet bath!'_

Just as she happily started crossing the kitchen, though, she noticed Inari looking morosely at the wall behind her. She had caught him doing that many times throughout their meal and, unable to contain her curiosity any longer, followed the boy's gaze.

Hanging on the wall was a picture of Tazuna's family, all of them smiling cheerfully. Even Inari had a wide, happy grin on his face... but as odd as that was, what was even weirder was how the top right corner was ripped out. Part of what she assumed to be a man's torso and arm could still be seen behind a crouching Tazuna, but the man's face and identity were complete unknowns.

"What is up with this picture?" She asked before thinking about the situation. As she was facing the wall, Sakura failed to see Tazuna and his family tensing and thus she continued to voice her thoughts innocently. "Part of it is torn out... and Inari-kun was staring at it throughout dinner. It looks like there was someone else in here, but I can't see their face."

Hinata's eyes widened once she and the rest of the ninja present looked at said picture. _'This picture...! It's the same one Tsunami-san had been staring at yesterday!'_

"...He was my husband," Tsunami conceded, desperately hoping that her guests wouldn't pry any further.

Her wish was useless, as her father decided to unveil the whole truth.

"His name was Kaiza. He... was known as a hero in this country."

Before Tazuna managed to even complete his sentence, his grandson pushed his unfinished dinner away and immediately walked out. His mother worriedly rushed to follow him right after, only stopping for a brief moment as she opened the door to the living room.

"Father! We don't talk about him like that around Inari! You know that!"

Sakura watched the whole exchange guiltily, not expecting that he innocent question could blow up on her face so magnificently.

"What's wrong with the squirt?" Kiba asked, suspiciously. _'I thought he was just a moody brat, but I guess there's more to it than him being Sasuke. Jr...'_

Naruto, on the other hand, did not care much for the boy's well-being. What caught his attention was a completely different part of what Tazuna had just said.

"A hero!? Inari's dad was a hero?"

"No... Kaiza isn't his father by birth; he came into our family merely four years ago," Tazuna answered, shaking his head. He stopped for a moment as his throat tightened, but at Kakashi's prompting the old man continued his tale.

"He was the man that taught the people of this country the meaning of the word courage," he began, and from that point onwards he didn't hesitate to continue telling the behind Kaiza and Inari, even as tears began to fall from behind his glasses.

It was the story of a simple fisherman, who ended up on the shores of the Land of Waves in pursuit of a dream... and of a young boy, whose cowardice held him back from trying to save his precious dog from drowning after a group of bullies threw the pup to the sea, and as punishment, was also thrown to the waters and left to die.

Their fates intertwined in that day, when Kaiza rescued Inari from drowning and made sure to scold the kids for almost killing the boy and his dog. And whereas the dog, scorned, abandoned his master, Inari forged a new bond that day with the stranger that risked his life to save a kid he didn't even know.

It was the story of a man that believed that, no matter how painful or hard the situation might be, one needed to do their best to protect what they held dear to them, even if with nothing more than just their own two arms.

Though he and Inari parted ways not soon afterwards, it was only a few days later when Kaiza stumbled upon the boy's mother being robbed in the middle of a street. The dinner he was offered after dealing with the pair of knife-wielding thieves brought about the re-encounter between the boy and his savior, and the two became inseparable from that point onwards. Kaiza frequented Tazuna's household frequently, and he and Tsunami eventually fell in love during that time. Since Inari's real father had abandoned Tsunami after hearing about her pregnancy, it fell to Kaiza to fill in the role of the paternal figure that the boy never had while growing up, and their life was one of much happiness.

It was the story of a man who bravely challenged Mother Nature and came out victorious.

In a rainy season that was much stronger than the Land of Waves was accustomed to, the town's floodgate simply couldn't support the amount of water that was raging behind its closed doors, and it broke, leaving the overflowing waters to rush towards the lower districts of their island. Undaunted, Kaiza had a rope tied around his waist and bravely swan through the currents, bringing his rope with him to the other side of the river so that the other villagers had a chance to close the floodgates before a tragedy could happen.

It was the story of a hero, who wouldn't bow down to the will of a man consumed by greed, and whose courage inspired many to stand with him.

When Gatou showed up two years after Kaiza and Inari met, his thugs ran freely on the Land of Waves as if they owned the place. Rallying the villagers to fight for their country, Kaiza formed a resistance, and he and his men fought against the invaders, weakening Gatou's hold over the islands. Inspired by the one they called a hero and armed with not much more than some knives and wooden clubs, they eventually located where Gatou resided and sought to liberate their home from the tyrant before it was too late.

It became the story of a man that could not accept being opposed, be it by one local hero or by an entire country.

During his life, if there was one thing Gatou learned was that money solved all of his problems. When the people of the Land of Waves revolted, united under the command of the one they called hero. Gatou reluctantly invested in more mercenaries and bodyguards. The investment paid off when they suppressed the rebellion, and the "insurgency" had their leader captured.

It was the story of a boy who came to believe that, no matter how painful or hard the situation might be, his father would always protect what he held dear, even if with nothing more than just their own two arms.

The day following Kaiza's defeat, the people of the Land of Waves were told by Gatou's men to come to the town square. Curious, Inari followed the masses and stumbled upon a sight that would haunt him for the rest of his days. Strapped to wooden cross was the beaten and bloodied form of Kaiza, surrounded by Gatou and his mercenaries. The man's arms, which were meant to protect everyone he ever held dear... were purple, broken and swollen. Useless.

Inari then watched the unbeatable hero he came to idolize and love die in front of him, executed mercilessly with dozens of stabs to his torso; his blood leaking out of his body just as fast as his life did.

It became the story of a boy that came to realize that all the things he had ever believed in were no more than lies.

 _"Let this be a lesson to anyone that ever tries to go against me again: there are no heroes in this world!"_

"...Ever since that day, everyone changed," Tazuna continued, trying to keep his voice and tears under control with little success. "My family... our people... they all lost the will to continue forward and the strength to smile and keep walking in the face of adversity. You two saw it with your own eyes," he affirmed, looking at Kurenai and Shino, who had accompanied him to the marketplace on the day they arrived.

Misery was the only word the two could possibly use to describe what they saw. But it wasn't merely a physical misery, coming from people who lacked money, food, and other belongings... but a spiritual misery. The aura of defeat that the whole city exuded was almost as overwhelming as Zabuza's killer intent had been.

"This... _this_ is why the bridge you all are helping me build is so important! It's not just about the country's economy, but our people's lives! Our souls! Gatou took everything away from us... and this bridge—this chance to free ourselves from his grasp—it is the only way to restore the Land of Waves to what it once was. It's the only way to make everyone believe again... and," he faltered, removing his glasses to wipe his eyes.

"And... it is the only way that I could ever see my grandson smile again..." Tazuna finished in a whisper.

Taking a moment to recompose himself, he met every ninja's eyes with his own to see if they truly understood now what they all were fighting for. That this all was much more than just protecting his old drunken ass. Seeing a mix of sadness, anger, understanding and shock in each of them was what he expected and for the most part it, was enough for him. But when his tired, moist gaze fell on a certain someone, he saw the one thing he had been longing to see the most.

Scowling, Naruto shoved himself away from the table and made his way to the door, only to trip on his feet and crash to ground.

"What are you doing down there, Naruto?" Kiba questioned as Akamaru stood right in front of the fallen genin's face and barked at him, almost as if encouraging the blond as he struggled to get up and continue walking forward.

His legs were aching, and he felt more tired than when Iruka forced him to clean up the Hokage monument after his last and greatest prank, but if there was one thing that Naruto knew for sure it was that a little pain and discomfort would not stop him.

"I'm going out to train," he growled out.

"Naruto, you can barely stand," Sakura pointed out with a scolding edge to her tone.

"You have more stamina than the average people but even you have limits," Kakashi lectured. "If you keep using your chakra like that you might end up dead."

"Heh, don't underestimate me!" Ignoring the warnings, the boy left the room, but not before saying one last thing:

"I'll prove it to him that heroes still exist!"

After that declaration and the subsequent noises of Naruto opening the house's door and leaving, it was no surprise that those still in the kitchen fell silent from shock.

 _'...Man, what a figure; trying to look all badass like that even though he can't even walk straight,'_ Kiba thought, with an amused smirk. He had always admired Naruto for his guts (even if he would never admit it), but this was something else. And, as his eyes scanned the room and saw his female teammate's expression, the Inuzuka couldn't help but grumble to himself. _'And even dorks have an audience to cater to, apparently... why do girls never go for the guys in the middle of the mark like me? I mean, it's always either the losers or the stoic bad boys!'_

"That fire..."

Tazuna mumble snapped Kiba from his thoughts. "What fire?"

"His eyes," The bridge builder answered, rising from his chair and slowly walking out of the kitchen. Despite the mood he previously was in, the old man couldn't help the smile forming on his face.

"I could see his determination burning in them as clear as day. The kid's will is a lot stronger than a disrespectful little brat of his age ought to have... and it's precisely the kind of strength of the spirit that this country and its people need to feel once again."

Drowning out the good night that Tazuna wished to everyone as he retired to his room, Sasuke got up from his chair with a loud noise as its feet scratched against the floor. The Uchiha heir also went to leave the room, but not before Kakashi called his attention.

"You aren't planning to climb trees with him, are you?"

"Yes and no." The boy turned around partially to face his sensei. "I'll go with him to make sure the idiot won't end up killing himself," Sasuke affirmed, taking note of how pleased both jonin were with his decision.

This, however, meant he didn't notice a certain blue-haired girl fidgeting as she also decided to interrupt him before he managed to get out.

"W-wait, Sasuke-san! Can... can I talk to you for a moment?" Hinata pleaded, also getting up, doing her best to ignore how everyone was looking at her.

Sasuke minutely motioned with his head for her to follow him, and the Hyuuga quickly hurried after him, catching up within the living room.

"What is it?"

"I, um... Naruto-kun still has my ointment with him, and... he's a bit forgetful sometimes, s-so I was thinking—"

"If it comes to that I will mention it to him," Sasuke interrupted her, and leaving the house. He and Hinata had reached an understanding ever since their first conversation, but it still stood that he didn't have much patience for her hesitation.

"Thank you, Sasuke-san," Hinata managed to say before he closed the door, having her slight bow answered with an even slighter nod and a door closed on her face.

Left alone, the girl sighed. _'I hope they stay safe out there...'_

Neither of the two had tracking or sensory abilities, so they were very vulnerable to ambushes and a healing ointment could only do so much, even when you healed mysteriously and unnaturally fast.

"Stop worrying," Kiba said, making Hinata jump slightly as the boy placed his hand on her shoulder, near the flame-like symbol of the Hyuuga clan. "If they get rowdy out there, it's fine. That's how we men settle our issues and bond with each other, y'know?"

The bluenette frowned in confusion, the statement being complete nonsense in her opinion. "I-is that really true?"

"Trust me, they'll be okay," he assured the girl, with Akamaru backing him up with a bark down by their feet.

The Inuzuka completely missed why she had been apprehensive, and as such, Hinata's worried expression barely softened instead of going away completely. It made the boy remember what Shino and Sakura had told him and Kurenai earlier while the Hyuuga had been bathing, bringing a frown to his face.

"I do hope this doesn't mean you will be forcing me to fight unnecessarily on the pretense of deepening our friendship," Shino announced his presence as he entered the room with Sakura in tow.

"Between Kurenai-sensei's illusions and Shino's bugs, I know that they are safe out there," Sakura moved on to a more pressing issue. "Sasuke-kun basically said he'd keep Naruto away from the trees and I know he has enough common sense to not go too far away on his own."

"... I guess you are right," Hinata conceded half-heartedly. The girl then decided to start some small talk with her friends but her plan was put on the backburner as Kurenai also left the kitchen.

"Is everything okay over here?" the woman gently asked, shooting a significant look to the genin as she approached them.

It went all over Hinata's head, but the others quickly caught on.

"Everything WILL be okay once I finally have my bath, so if you'll excuse me..." Sakura quickly said before rushing upstairs.

"I believe you were curious about how our training went today, weren't you?" Shino spoke as he faced Kiba and motioned towards the guest room they were staying at.

"Oh yeah, you _did_ say something about learning an element! So which one you got?" The Inuzuka asked eagerly, despite already knowing the answer. Akamaru merely followed his master, oblivious to the confused stare that the youngest human member of Team 8 was giving them as they left.

"This reminds me of something," Kurenai began, thanking Shino for leaving such an obvious hook. "I have been told that you didn't react too well to learning your affinity is Water, Hinata. Do you perhaps have a problem with the element?"

"N-no. I-It's fine, Kurenai-sensei...um, my affinity, I mean," the girl mumbled, slightly displeased. _'Why did Kakashi-sensei had to go and tell her about it?'_

"Hinata, please don't lie to me," the woman scolded gently.

Sighing, the Hyuuga lowered her head but relented. "It's just that... the chakra strikes of the Gentle Fist seem to be Lighting-element attacks. Kakashi-sensei said so and... I am scared of what m-my father might think of me having the w-wrong affinity for... our clan's techniques."

"But you can always learn to manipulate another element later," Kurenai countered.

"Y-yes, of course... b-but I had more difficulty than most Hyuuga in learning how to use chakra in combat and... there are some very important and complex techniques that t-the heiress would need to know," Hinata explained, fiddling with her pointer fingers without even being aware of it.

The pressure of spouting half-truths to her sensei was what brought her nervous habit back.

The future head of the Hyuuga clan would indeed have to prove themselves worthy of being worthy by displaying mastery of the three greatest Gentle Fist arts: the Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms, the Rotation, and the Mountain Crusher. All of them are extremely hard to execute, requiring great chakra control and reserves to perform, among other things.

But as someone that would lose the title upon returning to Konoha, that mattered very little to Hinata. And despite not knowing about that circumstance, Kurenai still saw through the girl.

"That's not all of it, though. What aren't you telling me?"

And at that moment, Hinata realized there was no escaping this conversation. It took her a couple seconds to find the words she needed to speak, but eventually she confessed.

"It's... g-genetically speaking, I shouldn't have been born like this. With this affinity. I'm either n-not actually m-my father's biological daughter or... defective. And I—"

Hinata's words stopped with a gasp as Kurenai crouched to her level and hugged her, tightly.

"Please, Hinata! Don't _ever_ think of yourself as defective! There is nothing wrong with you..."

The girl sniffled to hold back her tears and answered the hug. It had been so long since the last time she was hugged like that. The pleasant, comforting warmth that seemed to have been gone with her mother's death was something she had yearned to feel once again... however...

Even that was not enough. Kurenai knew that there was no possible way to deal with her student's first theory. She could still say it was not Hinata's fault, but it would do very little for the girl and her family... which Hinata was painfully aware of as well.

"B-b-but even so! I... know he hates me," she whispered painfully. "He hates me for not being the daughter that he wanted and... he might disown me or, or even banish me from the clan when he hears about it."

As much as her clan disliked her, they were still her family. The last thing Hinata wanted was to have that take away from her... and yet, she knew that this would be the last straw for her father. He had already basically given up on her attempts to become a better user of Jyuuken when he delegated her training to Kurenai half a year prior, but there was only so much failure he could tolerate before drastic measures would need to be taken—or so she believed.

"...Even if it comes to that, Hinata," the older female loosened her hug to face her student. "Know that I will always have my doors open for you," Kurenai offered a smile, knowing that was as far as she could possibly go if that worst-case scenario came to pass.

"...Thank you very much, sensei." Somehow finding happiness within sadness at that moment, Hinata reflected the smile with one of her own.

It would hurt to have to part ways with her sister or her bodyguard and retainer, Ko, and the many other members of the branch house that treated her with so much kindness... and the knowledge that she never ended up having the chance to prove her father and clan wrong would always be haunting her.

But she at least knew not all would be lost. Not while Team 8 still existed.

Sniffing once again and rubbing her eyes for good measure, Hinata broke the hug entirely. "I'm better now. Thank you, sensei..." she repeated shakily, this time with a bow.

"I'm glad you are feeling better... but there's something rather unpleasant that I need you to do."

"...What is it?"

"Do you remember what our first team activity was after you passed my test?"

The girl tilted her head to the side. "We had lunch at that restaurant..."

Kurenai smiled approvingly, if a bit hesitantly. "Yes. But if you think a little harder, you will remember that I wanted for us all to share our stories with each other, to know the people we would be working on for years to come. And... I know that you have problems socializing and that your childhood wasn't a good one, but I believe it is time for you to open up to your teammates, Hinata."

The bluenette looked away for a moment, glancing at the closed door far on the end of the corridor, which led to the guest room Kiba and Shino were in. Kurenai had let her minimalist, generic description of her everyday life, hobbies and past slide beforehand; the excuse that life within the Hyuuga clan was just training, tea ceremonies and other boring activities wasn't hard to buy given her family's infamy, but...

"You have been worrying them, you know? Kiba, Shino, and even Sakura don't have an idea of what you go through, they just see you wavering and don't know how to possibly try to help. I can be here for you, but having more people that you can truly rely on would not hurt you," Kurenai advised.

"But... w-what if—"

"If they reject you?" The jonin shook her head when the girl's lavender eyes widened before they guilty directed themselves to the floor instead. "Hinata... you've spent enough time around them to know neither will judge you for not living up to your clan's demands. Shino comes from a similar environment... far less abusive, but just as pressuring. And Kiba never criticized you for the times you made mistakes during our missions, didn't he?"

"Yes, but... still. A-are you sure, sensei...?"

The chance of pushing away the few people that accepted her was something Hinata did not want to gamble with. The risk was simply too great.

"Trust me." Kurenai placed a hand on the girl's shoulder, prompting her to look up once again. "And trust them as well; they would be sad to hear you think they'd turn your backs on you for things that were mostly beyond your control."

"..."

 _'But... perhaps it is a risk I can take,'_ Hinata ultimately decided... if only to make her friends aware that they shouldn't bother with her problems because they can't fix them no matter what. Kurenai had been right; she knew both of her teammates enough to know neither would resent her for her failures like she was expecting.

But everyone else besides Kurenai did. No matter how illogical, what could she possibly be expecting?

"I... will try," she promised. And as someone inspired her to, she'd keep her word to the end. _'There's no going back now.'_

Kurenai's only response was a gentle, but proud smile. The little girl she had first met six months ago—who seemed even smaller in the face of the harsh criticism of her father, who basically threw her away as if she were trash—would have never tried to go out of her little shell-shaped comfort zone like this.

"I will wait for Sakura-san, though."

"Sakura?"

"Mm," Hinata bobbed her head. "Sakura-san has been very supportive lately and... she shared some of her past with me. I... I think it's only fair..."

 _'What an interesting development,'_ the woman mused. Having a female friend of her age would be excellent to help Hinata grow. Some things wouldn't be comfortable to discuss with a person of over twice her age, after all...

"Very well. Would you like to drink some tea while we wait? I think there's still a bit in the teapot if Kakashi hasn't drunk it all."

The next few minutes passed, with student and teacher silently enjoying some nice, warm tea, until eventually...

"I hear someone descending," Kurenai commented, motioning with her chin for Hinata to go check.

Spying undetected from near the doorway with the skills developed from years of... people-watching... allowed her to see Sakura. The pinkette was also in a fresh and clean variation of her usual garments, but with a long white towel wrapped around the top of her head to help dry her wet pink tresses.

With one last glance at her sensei, who merely winked as a response, Hinata took a deep breath and walked forward. She had made her decision, and as a certain someone had taught her to, giving up was simply not going to happen.

 _'It's all or nothing!'_

* * *

A/N:

And... we're done here for now.

I am considering opening the next chapter with the beginning of Sasuke's interaction with Naruto outside (as in, 99% chance of it happening unless the scene doesn't work), but Hinata's conversation with her teammates/Sakura won't make the cut, I'm afraid. The details she will talk about will pop up now and then when they are relevant, if they haven't already.

...The plan for the next chapter is for it to end right before the battle on the bridge starts, so please hold on for a little while longer. Remember that there are more things I have to cover in this Land of Waves arc compared to the original: character interactions, friendships, and even some world-building. Naturally, the arc would end up bigger.

On a related note, I went a bit deeper on the Kaiza/Inari plot line than most fics. Sorry if it bored you guys, but I feel like the arc's impact is severely dulled when said side plot is skipped like how most fics seem to operate (At least on the naruhina side of the spectrum).

Stay tuned for the next chapter! There shouldn't be any delays but... there are some cool games releasing by now. I could get sidetracked. Sorry if it comes to that, but when college comes up again I will have no time for that so... yeah. I am also taking some time to revise the previous chapters with some much needed typo hunting and minor fixes.

Shout-outs to SimplePotato, who beta'd this despite a troublesome week!

Hope you all enjoyed it! If you can tell me your thoughts about this chapter, I'd be really thankful... my beta really liked this, so I wonder if you guys think the same or if its total crap and the dastard was just lying to me cuz he is a jerk sometimes. Between using an elemental affinity for drama and the new character introduced here, as well as my shody attempt to explain the Kaiza/Inari plot, I think there's enough stuff to talk about...

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.0.1 (03/07/2016)

Fixed two instances where Haku and Haru's names were mixed up. Thanks to _gio08_ and _marimo08_ for noticing this!


	12. Chapter 12 - Dilemma Unsolved

Hey guys! Wassup!

Before we begin... I just wanted to clear something up. _**DryBonesKing**_ , the person behind the amazing story " **True Potential** ", recently left a review for this story and... while it made me very happy to have another author I admire reading my little fic, it made me realize a few readers might have misunderstood one aspect of this story.

Way back in chapter one, Kakashi, Kurenai, and Hiruzen talked about "deposing" the Mizukage... I meant for that to be an, er, indirect deposition. To them, getting rid of Gatou practically ensures Yagura would be subsequently defeated by Mei's rebels since he can't sustain his army as well.

I apologize for this mistake on my part... Chapter 1 was fixed so that no new readers can possibly be confused about it, at least. There will be no direct involvement of Konoha in the Kirigakure civil war. I don't want to rip off **True Potential** , and I also lack the skill to pull off that kind of arc.

Another misleading thing I must apologize for: I apparently changed my profile's updating schedule from bi-weekly to monthly at one point but forgot to save that change... now it has been fixed. My apologies, for those that read that tidbit before reaching these last few chapters and seeing the change to monthly in my A/Ns instead of the profile... I'm pretty sure I "made" that specific change on January, so there's gotta be a fair lot of people I owe an apology to.

...Anyways, my response to two guest reviewers:

The one asking for more Sasusaku: There's a relatively big moment in this chapter! But... this pairing will only get moments sporadically. They ARE secondary to Naruhina, after all. I also accidentally deleted your "review" while trying to delete some flames. (Yeah, I got flames. One was from a guest that went by "KingKakashi", and another who completely failed to grasp the point of fanfiction and simple timeline concepts, lol). Sorry bout that.

The one that liked my story: Glad you liked it! I too enjoy stories that follow more the normal path of canon series (both in terms of events and the personalities of everyone involved), but unless it goes way too OOC/AU, I don't mind them. I didn't mind that you reviewed C1 instead of the latest... but I deleted the original review since you posted another.

Between all of those deletes, I deprived myself of my 150th review. Let's see it happening for this chapter, then! Grab a sandwich and read on! This one is the biggest yet! (But no bridge yet. I'm deeply sorry.)

* * *

 _Land of Waves Arc_

Chapter 12: Dilemma Unsolved (Current Version: 1.1)

* * *

After leaving Tazuna's home, Sasuke merely walked around the wooden platform the house was suspended on, calmly turning around the corners until his feet were able to touch the grassy ground again.

Given Naruto's reckless nature, perhaps he should have ran in pursuit of his teammate to ensure the blond's impulsivity didn't end up bringing his end by chakra exhaustion of all things... but he was in no hurry.

Firstly, Sasuke's legs weren't in the best condition ever. Running would only backfire on him, so he kept going at a moderately slow pace. Besides, the Uchiha knew that there was no need to run in order to catch up to Naruto.

It only took a minute of walking for him to smirk satisfactorily. His guess had been spot-on.

"You never know when to quit, do you?" Sasuke asked rhetorically, still walking.

His question was initially answered with a loud groan of annoyance as Naruto rose from the ground, a groan that wasn't just because of the newfound company, but because the blond had tripped over thin air again. "What are you doing here? Don't tell me you came to train too..."

"And if I did?" Sasuke challenged as Naruto turned around. "You were sprawled on the ground, it's not like you can stop me."

"Heh... I have a lot more chakra than you," the blonde spat back with pride. It was the only aspect he knew he one-upped his teammate on. "There's no way you will last more than a couple minutes climbing trees, but I can go on for the entire night!"

"Did you know that each time you fall you have to spend chakra to try again?" Sasuke frowned. "Your control is horrible. Even though your reserves are bigger than mine, you waste a lot more chakra doing it. You are an idiot if you think you can climb for more time than me."

A familiar flare of anger shone in Naruto's eyes, making Sasuke scold himself. _'Dammit, this is not what I came here for...'_

"So this is what you came here for, huh?! Alright, I'll take you on!" The Uzumaki pointed at him, voice becoming louder and louder by the second. "I won't lose!"

Sasuke cringed at the volume. "Shut up, idiot."

"Oh, scared, aren't you?!" Naruto smirked triumphantly as he marched towards his teammate until they were inches away from each other. "You know you can't win."

"What I know, is that we'll both pass out and maybe die out there if we go on with this stupid competition that _you_ came up with," the Uchiha countered, pushing Naruto away slightly as the blond breached his personal space.

Naruto backed off, stopping a couple feet apart from Sasuke, confused. Had he misunderstood things again? "...Then what the hell are you doing here?"

"You remember that the others were learning how to manipulate elements, right?"

"...Yeah. So what?!" As if Sasuke's vagueness wasn't annoying enough to Naruto, the Uchiha just had to rub salt in the open wound.

"They didn't spend all day training like that. In order to not burn all of their chakra at once, they frequently stopped and just sparred with each other. Do you get it now?" Sasuke questioned impatiently, as evidenced both by his tone and the arms crossed in front of his chest as the blond processed everything.

"...So, you came here to fight? With _me_?" Naruto pointed at himself incredulously. This was the only logical conclusion he arrived at, but knowing their relationship and how their fights generally went, it simply didn't make sense. Sasuke had never had any trouble in winning their duels in less than 10 seconds; he would get nothing worthwhile out of fighting him.

And yet, Sasuke nodded, confirming Naruto's theory.

"I don't get it. Why me and not Kiba, or I dunno, Shino?" the whiskered boy couldn't help but ask.

"Because neither of them were stupid enough to try training late at night while low on chakra," came the simple reply. It made Naruto's eyebrow twitch, especially when his teammate suddenly smirked at him.

"Besides... this will be different from our other spars. I'm going to give you the chance to win." Naruto barred his teeth dangerously at the boy opposite him. "I won't go on the offensive this time. I don't have the energy to waste by throwing punches at you anyways."

" _You_...! Is this your idea of a joke, bastard?! There's no way I'm going to fight someone that won't fight back!"

"...Hn." Sasuke conceded. He crossed his arms and closed his eyes for a moment. "Let me rephrase it: I won't let you go out there to climb trees unless you can land a solid hit on me using only taijutsu."

"Hmph. And what if don't accept?" Naruto asked defiantly.

"I'll just come after you, kick your ass and bring you back home." Sasuke slipped into a fighting stance. "You are slower than me, both in running and in attacking. I can catch up to you, and I can dodge your attacks all day long."

Even though that was true on a normal day, this time Sasuke wasn't feeling super confident on his speed being enough to match Naruto's superior stamina, not after a full day of training. The chase might even leave him tired enough for Naruto to fight him and win afterwards, and that wasn't something Sasuke was willing to risk.

"Oh yeah...? You just said you didn't have the energy to throw out a punch," Naruto pointed out with a confident grin. "You can't catch up to me."

"Tsk." Sasuke frowned as Naruto called his bluff. He hadn't truly planned for this moment when he went after Naruto; his hope had been that the prospect of a fight would have sufficed to make the blond spar with him, but he had underestimated how petty the Uzumaki could be. He simply didn't want to give Sasuke what he wanted.

But Sasuke still had one more card to play.

"I guess you will never become Hokage after all."

"What did you say?!"

"Who'd want to follow a coward like you?" This time, it was the Uchiha who had a confident grin as he prepared for the finishing blow.

"...Chicken."

"Oh, that's _it_!" Sasuke knew he had won when Naruto assumed what could only be a parody of a fighting stance. "You're on, Sasuke! I'll make you pay for that! ...And for kicking me awake the other day, too!"

Having said that, Naruto advanced towards his foe, winding up for a punch as he ran. Sasuke merely waited for the blond to approach, eyes narrowed as he watched Naruto's every movement.

 _'Left hook, right hook,'_ Sasuke thought, focusing only on avoiding the slow blows. _'Left hook again, jab, knee—there!'_

Seeing an opening when Naruto tried to knee him, Sasuke hooked one of his legs behind the only one Naruto had to support himself and swept him, making the blond fall to the floor once again.

"You left yourself open with that attack," he remarked, jumping away to put more distance between then. "And you do realize I only kicked you because you ignored me when I went to call you, don't you?"

"Hey, you said you weren't going to attack!" Naruto yelled, ignoring the Uchiha's point. He honestly didn't remember anything prior to the kick, so there was no possible way to refute Sasuke's claim.

"I only said I wasn't going on the offensive," Sasuke reiterated as the blond got up. "Now, are you going to keep whining like a kid or are you going to fight?"

"Shut up!"

And with that the two re-engaged, unaware of the watchful eyes that eventually began to spy on them. Though at first there was only a single eye, after a few minutes another person appeared, bringing the eye count to three.

"I'm a little disappointed in the approach he took," Kurenai said, watching the two genin from the wooden platform that supported Tazuna's house.

"I didn't expect them to start fighting like that, but I think Sasuke has a plan," Kakashi theorized.

"What makes you think that?"

"He actually pointed out Naruto's mistake and he is staying on the "defensive". He's trying to make Naruto think a little more on how he fights instead of throwing blows blindly," Kakashi explained, eye still trained on his students. "Usually, Sasuke considers sparring with Naruto a waste of time and just wants to finish him off as fast as he can to do something else instead, but this is new."

Absorbing the new information, Kurenai went back to watch the two boys just in time to see Naruto being tossed to the ground after overcommitting to a jab.

"I said you only need to hit me once," Sasuke repeated with a frown. "If you are trying to put so much strength into your punches, you will never be fast enough to land that hit."

Naruto snorted in response, as if dismissing the tip. In his mind, however, he conceded a change of plans was in order. _'Damn, Sasuke is tired but he can still dodge just as well as any other day. Or... maybe I am slower than usual? Bah, whatever. I need to find a way to get to him but... oh, that could work! I don't use those often, so yeah, I could mess up... but he won't be expecting it either!'_

Sasuke's eyes narrowed. _'He is planning something,'_ he realized with a bit of dread. Naruto was smirking once again, but no insult followed. Instead, the blond immediately went on the attack, winding up his right arm for a punch as he ran.

 _'Nope, he hasn't learned a thing...'_ the Uchiha corrected his previous thought while he preparing to dodge the obvious overhead Naruto was charging up. Sasuke didn't even need to spend time to think of an answer to the move; a vertical haymaker was simple to avoid with a small jump to the side.

And that was exactly how the next moments played out: Naruto's predictable move didn't take any effort from Sasuke's part to dodge... but Naruto continued running after the swing, only briefly turning to the side the Uchiha jumped to while positioning his elbow to slam right into Sasuke's stomach before the boy could land.

 _'Dammit!'_ The raven-haired boy cursed, throwing himself to the ground as best as he could to avoid the unexpected blow. Unintentionally, Sasuke's legs were still right in front of Naruto's charge, tripping the blond and sending him to the ground once again.

Sasuke didn't waste any time in getting up to put more distance between himself and his fallen teammate before the Uzumaki could pursue him.

"Argh, you still dodged that?" Naruto muttered as he got up from the ground.

"...You almost had me there," Sasuke admitted after a moment of hesitation. He didn't like that he almost lost, but remembering Hinata's words, he decided to not present himself as a rival, but as someone that was trying to help Naruto to improve.

"Wait, really?!" Naruto took a moment to wonder if he developed some sort of hearing or mental problem, but...

"Yes. I didn't expect a feint from you, but you're gonna have to try harder to win." The Uchiha smirked, an action that his opponent soon mirrored.

"Heh, don't worry. I definitively won't lose to you!"

And as such the fighting resumed, and Kakashi couldn't help the proud smile that formed under his mask. "There was this aura of enmity between the two before, or at least when Sasuke didn't dismiss Naruto outright. I'm glad to see they seem to be coming to terms with each other."

Kurenai merely nodded in response, focusing on the little duel happening in front of her. She, too, was satisfied with how the two boys were improving. _'At least I didn't go wrong with those two...'_

Remembering her hasty, stress-induced decisions during the time she spent with Team 7 made the kunoichi sigh. That only one of the three students didn't end up badly affected by what she had done was incredibly lucky, in hindsight.

The almost inaudible sigh caught Kakashi's attention. "Worried about how things are going with your own team?"

"...Yeah." Though her friend had misinterpreted, Kurenai couldn't deny that what happened with Hinata was weighing on her as well. "I wanted to be there to help, but this is something I think they need to do by themselves... especially Hinata."

"You made the right choice," the Copy Ninja assured, glancing at the woman beside him. "If you are there for them every step of the way, they won't know how to walk by themselves later. That's what happens when you coddle someone too much, and in our line of work that would just get them killed."

"...Indeed."

Reflecting about Kakashi's views for a moment, she wondered how Team 7 would be faring if she had respected his approach to teaching them. _'Maybe if I had allowed them to interact and grow on their own instead of having a few directions pointed out to them, they would be better off in the end...'_

"Well, I'm going to stay here to make sure those two will at least take a bath before going to bed," Kakashi joked. "You have a long day tomorrow, so let me handle them and go rest."

Nodding, Kurenai decided to follow the man's suggestion and stopped dwelling on "what ifs" for the day. Once inside the house, she was tempted to sneak over to the guest room to see how her students were fairing, but ultimately decided against it.

 _'Let's save that for another time...'_

* * *

Hinata couldn't help the giggle that escaped her mouth.

"Fancy trick, drying stuff with chakra like that..." Kiba muttered over her shoulder as he left his plate and mug beside the sink. "Starting your training early, huh?"

"I suppose," she answered with a small smile. Perhaps using Water chakra to dry plates wasn't the most efficient way of doing the job, but it brought great amusement to the young Hyuuga. She had yet to complete the training exercise Kakashi had given to her, but working with a half-filled cup of water was much easier than with a bowl.

"Ah, now you're just showing off!" Kiba scolded her with a smirk as he watched the little stream of water spiraling from the cup the girl was washing to the one he had just used. "I guess your training is going well, then? It's been a couple days since you and the others started playing with elements."

"N-no... I need to work with a lot more water during training," she explained, now with a more neutral expression. "With just this much, it's not hard to make it all move the way I want but..."

"Don't worry, you will get it eventually," he assured her with a pat on the shoulder, bringing that smile back to her face alongside a faint blush.

It still felt unreal to Hinata that her teammates and Sakura acted so supportively of her after she told them a little more about her past. That, despite them knowing how she was a weakling that frequently was beaten by her younger sister, they still accepted them for who she was and didn't push her away or agree with her clan's assessment of her abilities.

 _'I'm so lucky to have found them...'_

"Mornin'..." someone greeted from the doorway, yawning at the end.

Hinata glanced backwards to see who it was. "Good morning Sakura-san,"

"Hey, pinky!" Kiba waved at her.

"Don't call me that! It's hard enough to swallow when Tazuna-san does it, especially now that we are training on the bridge instead of the forest," pinky complained as the two members of Team 8 laughed a bit at her. In the meantime, she went about preparing her breakfast and glanced around the kitchen. "So... where's everyone?"

"Shino and the adults went to buy some groceries," Kiba explained with a shrug. "I guess the other two are sleeping."

"Sasuke-kun and Naruto will be late." Sakura sipped her tea. "Shouldn't you wake them up?"

"I'm here," Sasuke announced his presence. "Naruto won't be coming."

"Naruto rejecting free food? That's a first," the Inuzuka commented.

"That's not it. He... landed a hit on me last night." Sasuke confessed, not with the shame he imagined the thought would bring, but rather, with a bit of pride. Naruto had earned his "victory", and Sasuke knew his unruly teammate was now a little better at taijutsu than before.

It took a few seconds for the other three to process that information. They already knew about the little after-dinner competition that Sasuke had roped Naruto into participating... and the silence was broken when Sakura groaned and let ample forehead strike an empty area of the table.

"Sasuke-kun... please don't tell me you actually let him go out there to climb trees in the dark..."

"Y-you didn't notice he was missing?" Hinata questioned her teammate, who held his hands up defensively.

"Hey, I don't keep tabs on him all the time. Do I look like Hinata Hyuuga to you?" he countered with a knowing smirk. As predicted, Hinata merely blushed as hard as she could and immediately turned around, hoping to get the embarrassment out of her system by finishing her chore.

"...Kakashi was watching us and he said it was fine," Sasuke ultimately answered. Possible reluctance to harm him aside... and even considering that they wouldn't be near each other for most of the day, Sasuke had a feeling that that day would be a bad day to have Sakura pissed at him, and not just because he had made the now-questionable decision of sitting across her. Thus, shifting the blame to someone else was the best Sasuke could do. _'It's not like I'm lying, either.'_

"Sheesh... that guy's way too carefree for a jonin. What if something happens out there?" Kiba wondered, his mind returning to Zabuza for a moment. Perhaps Kurenai's methods were rubbing off on him, but he didn't agree with Kakashi in this matter.

"Um... a-actually, I think it's fine," Hinata piped in. "Naruto-kun is used to train f-for long periods of time... y-you just need to have a little more faith on him."

"Naruto is a full-fledged ninja, even if doesn't look like it." The genin turned around to see the adults, as well as Shino, entering the room with recently bought groceries. "Like Hinata said," Kakashi continued, "he will be fine."

"As far as my bugs can tell, there is still nothing wrong with him," Shino helpfully supplied.

Hinata blinked. _'... Still?'_

One look at the women's displeased expressions, however, was enough to answer the question for her. _'Ah, perhaps they had this discussion earlier this morning,'_ she realized, remembering that all the adults had already been gathered by the time she went down. Though she almost always woke up at five in the morning, the Water elemental training coupled with the spars with Shino and Sakura took their toll on Hinata enough for her to sleep in some more.

"Still, even if he is alright as you said," Tsunami began, placing the groceries she held on a corner of the room, "he will miss breakfast."

"He could pass out from hunger," Hinata muttered, now feeling worried.

"I guess someone will have to bring it to him, then," Kiba shrugged. It didn't take a genius to come up with a solution... and it didn't take a genius to know that the devious smirk blossoming on Sakura's face was a prelude to a something troublesome, as a certain Nara he knew might have put it.

Unaware of that, Sasuke, feeling a little guilty for allowing Naruto to train overnight even if he had just been following Kakashi's instructions, decided to volunteer. "Since I will have to go out there any— _hnngh_!"

"I-I just had an idea," Sakura cut him off, stuttering and blushing as the Uchiha curled up and groaned in pain. She had meant to kick at Sasuke's leg to shut him up before he ruined everything, but... judging from how soft her target felt on her toes, she hadn't struck something with a bone structure... "Um... Hinata, why don't you go and bring Naruto's breakfast to him?"

Hinata blushed slightly, entertaining the possibility for the briefest of seconds before realizing, with some relief, that it simply wasn't an option. "We will be training at t-the bridge today, Sakura-san" she explained while going towards the refrigerator.

"Actually, there's no need for us to go this early to the bridge today," Tazuna butted in. "I guess you were a little too focused on playing with those bowls of water yesterday, but we will be waiting for a mechanic to fix a machine that broke before we can continue working."

Hinata blinked. Could she really have been that unaware?

"The damn machine apparently thought it was alright to break down just cuz it was about time to wrap it up for the day," the old man grumbled.

"We have a couple hours of rest thanks to that, though," Kurenai added, watching idly as Hinata poured some milk into a bowl and then mixed it with a little of sugar. "We could all use the break, I suppose."

"You can say that again," Kiba muttered, also watching his female teammate as she grabbed a box of cereal from the kitchen counter. "My legs are still sore from climbing trees nonstop."

"Then I suppose you aren't up for bringing Naruto's breakfast to him, right?" Sakura asked with a sweet tone and smile that were, in fact, anything but.

The pinkette's comment made Hinata stop just as she was about to bring Naruto's breakfast to the Inuzuka, her head turning towards Sakura for a moment before she faced Kiba once again.

 _'Help me! I'm not ready for this!'_ her gaze said, lavender eyes wide accompanying an expression that Kiba knew very well: the puppy dog face.

He almost gave in to his greatest weakness, but a glance at Sakura's eyes made him rethink his decision.

 _'Don't you dare, Inuzuka!'_ the emerald-like orbs communicated, with a clear edge of **'or else...!'** burning deep within the girl's irises. It brought a shiver down the boy's spine.

" _Why_..." his acute senses picked up Sasuke's pained whisper; the Uchiha was still too lost in pain to follow the conversation.

"Eh... sorry. I-I'll stay here," Kiba finally decided, guiltily scratching the back of his head while avoiding Hinata's betrayed gaze.

"And you know, I was thinking," Sakura smirked victoriously. "Kurenai-sensei, how about we have Sasuke-kun and Hinata switch places for the day? Maybe you can teach us some more on genjutsu, and Hinata's Byakugan might help Kiba and Naruto to get where they are going wrong with the trees, right?"

The genjutsu mistress narrowed her eyes. She didn't like how forceful Sakura was being, but then again, she had no right to be complaining about that after the events on Training Ground 5. _'And... I suppose the Sandaime did want me to keep working on genjutsu,'_ she remembered with a sigh.

"Alright... I suppose I can continue my lessons for today."

"S-sensei!"

"Cut your losses and do it already," Kiba recommended, watching as the other adults continued to deal with the grocery bags. "Sides, it can't be that bad, right? And look, you even prepared the bowl for him already," he pointed at the cereal bowl the girl held, which even had a spoon.

"Y-yes, but—!"

"Naruto is probably hungry by now... make sure you won't drop the food!"

Shooting a dirty look at Sakura, who had placed her dishes on the sink and subsequently started washing them, cutting off Hinata's escape route. The bluenette's shoulders sagged and she decided to stop fighting.

"Fine, I'm going..." the girl gave up, only stopping briefly to grab a small bunch of cinnamon and apple cookies from a nearby pot before leaving with Naruto's bowl of cereal.

 _'I don't know if I should be impressed or ashamed by what she just did,'_ Kakashi mused, looking at his female student as Kiba approached her. _'That was an incredibly shameless way of manipulating the situation, but it somehow worked out...'_

"This is just a guess," the Inuzuka nudged the pinkette, "but I think you actually managed to piss her off. That's the first time I've seen that look on her face."

"Bah, it's for her own good," Sakura waved her wet hand dismissively, and Kiba shrugged in response. "She'll be thanking me later." After all, the girl thought, that was one of the things her old best friend had done to her to help break through her developed shyness, and Sakura knew she only came stronger out of the experience despite how stressing it had been.

Kiba, however, was still unsure. Ever since Naruto had come to him wondering about Hinata's behavior after their win over the Demon Brothers, he had been trying to incentivize the two of them to spend more time with each other when he could.

Unlike Sakura, who had been merely trying to play matchmaker from where he was standing, Kiba knew that the two would be good influences on each other. Naruto would have to tread more carefully around the seemingly frail Hinata to not scare her away, while exposing the Hyuuga to her crush would likely help her become a little more outgoing and confident just like the boy she looked up to.

 _'Still, I'm not too sure this was the right way of going about that...'_

* * *

Outside the house, on her way to the clearing where Kakashi had the group practicing, Hinata found herself regretting a bit her earlier thoughts about the new bonds she had forged during the past few days. Of course, those were spur of the moment thoughts, but the usually shy Hyuuga couldn't help the annoyance and the little bit of anger bubbling up inside her.

Perhaps she wasn't totally justified in feeling like that, but the fact that Hinata had basically no choice on the matter was the cause of those feelings. Especially because she knew that Sakura had once been a shy person and would've known better than practically forcing Hinata to go so far from her comfort zone.

Saying "No" would've been a simple way of resolving the issue, but Hinata knew she would have felt awful leaving Naruto hungry... and she had never been good at refusing people anyways.

Nonetheless, she still sulked.

 _'Sure, I DID prepare Naruto-kun's breakfast, but someone would have to do it anyways! It's not like I was planning to bring it to him... this isn't fair,'_ she whined, walking with heavier steps than usual and with a rare frown plastered across her face as she munched on one of the cookies she had grabbed before leaving. _'At least you will never betray me, right cookie?'_

The blue-haired girl even forgot about using her dojutsu to check up on Naruto as she moved around the forest, and once she did remember, she felt a little too lazy to set Naruto's breakfast on the ground just to go through the Byakugan's hand seals.

Ultimately she didn't really need it, as she still remembered the way perfectly. But, perhaps, she might have noticed someone approaching the area where the Uzumaki currently was... someone who had way too much chakra to be a mere civilian...

But after a few minutes of walking, the girl calmed herself down. _'Sakura-san was just trying to help,'_ she told herself, trying repressing her feelings. _'And I suppose this might be for the best... I do still need to properly apologize to him,'_ she thought, remembering the little incident where she accidentally mocked Naruto on the kitchen a few days prior.

It didn't take long for the shy Hyuuga to arrive at where Naruto was, and setting her sights on the blond, the girl's heart skipped one full heartbeat before resuming much faster than before as panic took hold of her.

"Naruto-kun!"

The fairly dirty boy was sprawled on the ground near a badly scratched tree, loosely holding a kunai while a few birds decided that his orange tracksuit was comfortable enough for a small moment of rest.

Paying no mind to the small birds she scared away or the few drops of milk that she spilled on her way, Hinata ran as fast as she could towards the fallen blond, fearing the worst.

It had been a little hard to hear, what with the noisy wing flaps around her and the sound of her beating heart loud on her ears, but as soon as she knelt beside Naruto she started hearing his mildly soft snores.

 _'Oh god... he's alive,'_ she constated with a smile, before quickly shoving the rest of her cookies inside her mouth, knowing that nothing else but more sweets would calm her down after such a scare.

"More... ramen," the boy mumbled in his sleep, earning a muffled giggle for the girl beside him.

 _'You must really be hungry,'_ she thought, munching on her precious cookies, losing herself to the sweet goodness on her mouth for a second. _'I really should have grabbed more of those—'_

Hinata shook her head, perhaps a little too violently. _'Focus! Naruto-kun is hungry,'_ she repeated to herself to get her brain in gear. _'But... how do I wake him up?'_ she wondering, swallowing her little snack.

"Maybe I can rouse him with a stick...? Hmm..." It was a really simple thing that she needed to do, but considering how the boy had been complaining about Sasuke kicking him awake, she feared that being too forceful would upset him.

As an idea failed to come to mind, the girl couldn't help but become distracted once again, now by Naruto's sleeping form. _'Usually he's jumping around as if his energy is never-ending, but this is so unusual. Even though I watched him for so long, I've never seen him like this. He looks so peaceful, its almost like a different person...'_

The boy tossed and turned for a bit, scratching his belly idly as he mumbled unintelligibly in his sleep. It brought another smile to Hinata's face. _'Almost,'_ she thought, and she came to a decision at that moment.

Setting the bowl on the grass at a safe distance, she poked his shoulder with her pointer finger a few times.

"Naruto-kun."

No answer.

"Naruto-kun, please wake up," she spoke a little louder, now shaking him slightly. "I've brought breakfast..."

"Hrnnnm... wuzzit?" he slurred, opening his eyes slightly and closing them right away. "Argh... t'much light," he complained as he tried to sit up.

The little Hyuuga merely stood back and knelt on the grass, eyes watching as the blond rubbed his eyes, slowly accustoming himself to the light and his surroundings.

Naruto lazily looked around. "Hmm... this isn't Ichiraku Ramen."

Hinata couldn't resist laughing at that. "No, it's not," she agreed with a smile. Remembering her manners, she added: "Good morning, Naruto-kun,"

"Morning... Hinata?" he frowned in confusion. "Whatcha doing here?" he asked, groggily. _'I don't know why I'm here either,'_ he thought to himself, still not fully awake.

"You didn't return home yesterday, s-so..."

Naruto's eyes snapped wide open. "I guess I fell asleep here after one too many falls," he mumbled sheepishly, scratching his messy yellow mop of hair. "Heh, sorry about that... I made you guys worry."

"Being out in the dark by yourself is a bit dangerous," Hinata agreed, surprised by how easy the words came to her. "But I knew you'd be fine."

Naruto didn't know how to process that, so he just stared dumbly at her. He could barely understand Hinata on a normal day, but doing so after he just woke up seemed completely impossible.

The girl, on her part, started to become a little more uncomfortable, wondering if she had said too much. "W-well... it's not ramen, but," she picked up the nearly forgotten bowl by her side. "I brought t-this."

The boy's stomach rumbled, and he smiled widely once his nose and eyes recognized what the girl held. "Heh, can't argue with that, right? Itadakimasu!"

It took less than a pair of minutes for Naruto's bowl to become empty, with Hinata watching him devour the bowl as the birds that she had scared away slowly reassembled beside the pair.

"Sweet, sweet cereal..." he droned on, patting his belly satisfactorily. "Thanks for bringing this to me, you know? I barely had the time to feel hungry!" Waking up with food close at hand was definitively a nice feeling.

"I-I'm glad you liked it," she replied with a bashful smile. She hadn't done much more than mixing the ingredients, but she still felt that familiar pang of pride at having her cooking complimented.

Naruto stared at her for a couple seconds and became confused. "Hmm... hey, why didja come out here? Shouldn't you be at the bridge by now?" he asked, raising his head to look at the sky. He had no idea of how to accurately judge time by using the sun's position, but he guessed that the girl, if not already late, would need to be in a hurry to return to Tazuna's house before Kurenai got on her case.

His confusion wavered once he saw an expression he had yet to see on the girl's face: a frown, aimed at the grass. "...Sakura-san p-pulled some strings to swap me and Sasuke-san around for the day by convincing Kurenai-sensei to teach them more about genjutsu," she explained, allowing Naruto to discover how her voice sounded when she was annoyed.

Naruto was taken aback for a second, not having an idea of why Hinata would be annoyed... before becoming annoyed himself. "Hmph. I'm not surprised. I guess she still is after Sasuke..."

Hinata blinked for a moment. "You... could be right," she agreed, now wondering if Sakura had intentionally just shot down two birds with one stone, or if she had focused just on one and got lucky.

The blond arched an eyebrow at her, crossing his arms in front of his chest. "Why else would she do that?" Spending a little more brainpower on the question, he discovered something quite convenient for him. "You know, this ain't so bad..."

"...W-why so?" she asked, feeling a bit of hope welling up inside her. _'Maybe Naruto-kun—'_

"See those trees?" he pointed at two seemingly random trees. "Sasuke's still got a huge lead over me, and... I'm barely catching up to Kiba," he confessed with some embarrassment. "But! If the bastard misses out on a day of training, we can maybe get ahead of him!"

"Oh." Hinata looked down for a moment, dismayed. _'Of course...'_

"But you know," Naruto continued, "you're way better company than him, so there's that too!"

The girl felt a familiar heat coursing over her cheeks. "R-really...!?"

Somehow, Naruto caught the happiness mixed with shock in her voice and, still not knowing what to make of it all, he simply waved it off mentally and nodded. "Yeah, you're nice, even though you're also all quiet and weird."

Hinata felt as if someone had just dropped a huge, heavy anvil on her head, one that had been emblazoned with the word "weird" in big, capital letters... the impact made her brain completely forget Naruto had just said she was nice, too.

Oblivious to that, Naruto continued speaking. "And you actually know how to wake someone up, unlike that bastard. Though... he's not _that_ bad."

The boy's comment made Hinata feel hopeful again, but for a different reason. "Oh, I... I've heard you a-actually managed to strike him yesterday. C-congratulations!"

"That's right! Thanks!" Naruto nodded thrice, clearly excited. "It felt so good, sucker-punching him like that! Bastard had it coming for a long time, you know?"

The repeated use of the word "bastard" began to bother Hinata, and not just because she disliked such crude language. "W-well... but hasn't he been trying to change lately, Naruto-kun?"

Hinata's question made Naruto think for a moment. "Yeah... he's been trying to be more, uh, friendly? Something like that... I mean, before he insulted me every time we ever talked to each other and that's when he didn't ignore me outright, but nowadays he only does those it if I do something really stupid or if we are fighting."

"I see. Um, I'm glad you two are getting along better," she smiled, happy for both of them. _'It looks like I was a bit wrong... Sasuke-san has been playing on their rivalry to become friends with Naruto-kun, it seems.'_

"Yeah... well, he's still cold and all, but I guess he just doesn't know how to socialize very well," Naruto commented. It reminded Hinata that the Uzumaki could be deceptively observant at times, and not as dense as people were led to believe.

"R-remember what I told you about Shino-kun that day?" Naruto glanced at her confusedly. "W-when you brought my lunch to m-me?"

"Ah, sure! About having patience when dealing with him, right?" The blond adopted a thoughtful pose. "So then the same goes for Sasuke?"

"Yes. J-just keep that in mind, okay?"

"I'll try," Naruto mumbled. "But... you know, it's gonna be hard."

The girl tilted her head in confusion. "What do you mean?"

"You see, when I'm near Sasuke, I feel... _something_ really weird deep inside, you know?" Hinata paled considerably. "It's almost as if I'm drawn to him somehow, like if there was a something invisible connecting us. Each time we're around each other, I just feel this need to—"

Internally, Hinata started to panic as the rather traumatizing memory of seeing Sasuke and Naruto kissing unwillingly popped up in her mind.

"—beat the crap out of him. Like as if something in my head was driving me to defeat him, I dunno," he finished with a shrug, tilting his head when he noticed Hinata's unsubtle sigh of relief and how she visibly relaxed—or rather, how she had been tense for some reason.

"Hmm... oh, here!" Naruto exclaimed, returning the bowl he held to the girl. "Funny, it's like it always comes back to food with the two of us," he commented.

"...It does, doesn't it?" Hinata agreed after a moment of pause. She was reminded of how Sakura had incentivized her to try using something beyond food and fights/training to get closer to Naruto, but given their lifestyles, Hinata wondered if she couldn't just go with the flow and stick with the tried and proven. That, and the thought of it being Sakura's suggestion made the girl want to go against it out of pure childish spite, at least for a single moment before she banished that from her mind.

"That's not a bad thing, though," Naruto blurted out quickly after he saw the uncertainty across the girl's face. "But... sorry that you had to come all the way here just to bring me food,"

"Oh, p-please, I don't mind," she assured him with a smile that was both fake and sincere at the same time. _'As long as I have a choice on the matter, that is.'_

"Still, I kinda worried everyone, didn't I?" he rubbed the back of his head guiltily, which amused Hinata.

"A bit, b-besides Shino-kun, Kakashi-sensei and maybe Tazuna-san."

Naruto nodded. He knew Shino was basically keeping tabs on via a bug hidden somewhere in his personage—he shuddered—and Kakashi probably knew about his training habits prior to their first meeting... and Tazuna was just an asshole, but besides the unspoken addition of Inari to that list of people that weren't worried, he knew someone else was missing from it.

"You weren't either," he pointed out, deciding to try his luck. Naruto knew he probably wouldn't be getting anywhere, and seeing Hinata swallowing nervously all but confirmed it to him.

"I uh... w-well," she mumbled meaninglessly, trying to find a way out. It was useless, though; she was supposed to be helping Naruto during his training so there wasn't a way to flee from this situation. On the other hand, the girl couldn't simply say "I used to spend hours watching you training, so I knew you would be okay" without making the situation even more awkward that it already was.

In the end, Hinata remained completely silent, refusing to meet the blond's azure eyes. It was a bad, bad third option, but it also was the safest. _'He already thinks I'm a weirdo. It can't get much worse than this.'_

Hinata began to consider how to change the topic, hoping that Naruto was using the awkward silence to do the same.

"That's it!"

Unfortunately, Naruto's patience with her had finally run out.

"What the hell is your problem!?" he demanded, all but forcing Hinata to look at him as she cowered away, realizing her mistake.

She answered without thinking, panic clouding her mind. "I-I-I don't know what you're talking about!"

" _This!_ I'm talking about what you're doing right now!" Naruto motioned towards her. The shy Hyuuga's fearful demeanor made him feel bad for doing this to her, but Naruto could no longer hold himself back. "You... I dunno! You act so nicely to me in one moment and then the next you lock up and refuse to say anything! I don't get it!"

Watching as Naruto's own nervous habit of passing his hands through his hair haphazardly kicked in, Hinata could only regret what she had thought to be "successful" interactions with the blond. All of them had been only leading up to this moment, and now that things blew up, she had no idea of how to possibly answer him. Not that the girl could find her voice, at any rate.

"Look... Did I do something to you?" Naruto continued, in a more subdued tone than before. "You're usually a bit jumpy and nervous, but almost every time we speak there's always a point where you suddenly get really scared and silent and... I don't know what I am doing wrong. You don't do this around anyone else! Not even Sasuke!"

The only time Naruto could remember having an actual conversation with Hinata without any "inconveniences" was when she briefly helped him get the hang off tree climbing, likely because both had something to focus on outside of talking. On the flip side, there was also only a single instance where he had seen the girl clamming up around other people, when Kiba and Shino had confronted her about her actions during Team 8's training with Kakashi, right after they had first met Tazuna. And the context of said conversation had been very serious, and it didn't help that both of the girl's teammates kept pressing her for answers

 _'Was I pressuring her somehow, all this time? But... why?'_ he couldn't help but wonder, remembering that conversation he had listened to and failing to see the missing link. Hinata seemed nice enough, but, once again, he didn't know whether or not what they had could be called friendship... or if it would ever get to that point, given how things were going so far.

Meanwhile, Hinata felt the strong urge to create a shadow clone, solely for it to slap her for her foolishness. _'He's blaming himself for it... he thinks it's his fault! How could I've let things get to this point!?'_

In a way, she knew Naruto wasn't completely wrong. There were a lot of things about him that made the prospect of a conversation scary to Hinata, because the boy meant a lot to her. The fear of upsetting, disappointing or even saddening the person that had helped her so much throughout her short life—even if he never knew just how much he had done for her—always seemed to hold her back.

But her shy nature never helped matters, either. It made her unable to find the right words, and do the right things when talking to others, and the fact that it was _Naruto_ of all people... it intimidated her to a level that only her father managed to bring out in her. Of course, with her father it was always much worse, because with Naruto messing up was just a possibility that she had to deal with, rather than something she knew would happen inevitably.

And now, that possibility finally became a reality, and she could do nothing more than stand there, withering under Naruto's eyes as if he were one Hiashi Hyuuga.

Much like the head of the Hyuuga Clan, Naruto only became more frustrated as Hinata refused to answer him. He couldn't understand why she would remain silent like that; it would be so simple to just tell him where he was messing up so that he couldn't scare her again...

 _'Wait.'_ His eyes widened. Could it be that Hinata wasn't saying anything because she _couldn't_ say it?

...That memory surfaced in his mind, as vivid and detailed it had been when it had happened almost a month ago.

Suddenly, day had turned to night. He could feel the weight of the forbidden scroll strapped to his back, hear a wounded Iruka begging him to run away, see the smug smirk on Mizuki's face as he unveiled the mystery that had plagued him for his entire life—

"Oh my... I didn't expect to find anyone here at this hour," a new voice said, surprising both of the genin, and ending Naruto's thoughts before they became a full-blown flashback.

"Huh?" Naruto muttered, glancing warily at Hinata one last time before paying attention to the newcomer, who seemingly had been behind a tree about a dozen meters away from them. "Who are you, lady?"

"My name is Haru," the girl introduced herself, smiling at them as she approached. Both Naruto and Hinata were taking aback by girl's looks once they got a better look at her, especially the Uzumaki, given her clothing and how she appeared to be a couple years older than them.

 _'She's prettier than Sakura!'_ Naruto thought in awe, finding the girl's face and hair to be beautiful. Brown eyes and black, long hair were kind of bland in his opinion, and he hated bland things. But Haru managed to change his mind on that matter.

 _'What a beautiful kimono... and a bit daring, too,'_ Hinata mused. The garment exposed almost all of her arms, and the v-neck cut was just low enough that an inch of cleavage could be seen. Hinata's own kimonos were all much more conservative, and she wondered if one day she would have the guts to freely walk around with such a kimono.

 _'So I was right...'_ Haru, thought, noticing the headbands that the genin wore as well as the symbol emblazoned upon the metal plate. _'These two are part of the group that fought Zabuza-sama.'_

Hinata was the first to snap out of her thoughts. "Hello, Haru-san. I'm Hinata Hyuuga," she introduced herself, with the usual small bow that accompanied the practiced words

"And I am Naruto Uzumaki, future Hokage!" Naruto boasted, subconsciously feeling the need to show off in front of the pretty girl, who held back a giggle at his boisterous introduction.

"I take you two are ninja, then?" the girl pointed at Naruto's forehead and then Hinata's neck, the latter nodding. "So you two are from the Land of Fire's hidden village... that's a long way from where we are," she remarked. "I'm here gathering herbs, but what could you two be doing here so early?"

"Heh, I'm training," Naruto explained, and then motioning towards the treetops. "I need to run up one of those until I reach the very top _without using my hands!_ "

"Wow... is that even possible?" the brunette feigned ignorance, since the tree climbing technique wasn't supposed to be common knowledge among civilians.

"Of course it is! Just watch me!"

Following that declaration, the blond got up and gathered chakra, running towards one of the trees soon afterward. It didn't take more than a minute for him to drop down, seeing as he had yet to reach the halfway mark.

"Y-you've improved..." Hinata's tentative compliment was met with a neutral look from Naruto, making the heiress wilt. She understood the unspoken message that he wasn't going to forget their earlier discussion as easily as that.

"Though it seems you have a long way to go before you can reach the top," Haru offered her two cents quickly. "Still, that was rather impressive!"

Much to Hinata's horror, Naruto blushed at the compliment. "Y-yeah, but I'm still not done with this," he said meekly.

The kimono-clad girl turned her head towards the other female. "What about you? You don't look like you've been training," she commented, observing that Hinata's clothes were perfectly clean whereas Naruto's looked battered and dirty.

"W-well, I already can get to the top," she mumbled weakly, not wanting to upset Naruto somehow.

"So what were you doing here?"

"She just came to bring my breakfast, and later help me and another guy with our training," Naruto said neutrally.

"...You look too dirty to have been training just for a couple hours," Haru pointed out, coldly. "Don't tell me that you spent the whole night out here..."

"Er... I did?" The boy's answer brought out a scowl from the older girl.

"That's dangerous! For starters, you could've caught a cold sleeping out in the open like this!"

Naruto was caught a bit off-guard by the scolding, but responded carefreely nonetheless. "Oh yeah? I wanna see a cold that can actually catch me, haha!"

"Naruto-kun is almost never ill," Hinata supplied, making a still laughing Naruto wonder how she knew that. The explanation was enough to cool down Haru's temper, so he didn't dwell on it... for the moment.

"I see... well, since you two are ninja, do you mind taking on a mission for me?"

"Lady, we're already on a mission... we—"

"Are t-training right now, but w-we sadly can't accept another one," Hinata cut Naruto off, knowing that her crush would have spilled out details about their mission, which was something they weren't allowed to do unless strictly necessary for said mission's success. "I'm sorry..."

The older girl merely giggled. "Actually, it's more like a favor... like I said, I am looking for some herbs, so I was wondering if you two could help me out to search for them."

"Herbs?" Naruto sat down again, feeling stupid right afterwards because he realized he'd have to get up within a minute or two. "...Why'd you walk around so early in the morning just for something like that?"

Haru waggled her finger at him. "Herbs can be very useful. You can make teas, ointments, oils, or use them as you find them to help heal wounds, illnesses and even treat things such as poisons."

"T-there are also many other things we can find in forests that can be used as natural remedies," Hinata added. "Flowers, mushrooms, roots, leaves, fruits, seeds..."

"Oh... and hey," Naruto shoved his hand into his weapons pouch, bringing Hinata's ointment on the way back. "So you used those things to make this ointment?"

Hinata nodded. "T-there are herbs and flowers that help to heal the skin mixed in, yes."

"Wow, did you make this?" Haru questioned in wonder, and both Naruto and Hinata noted how different she had sounded from when she was "awed" by the tree climbing technique.

Still, the Hyuuga nodded again.

"Say... does this ointment work for deep wounds, like stab wounds?"

"Stab wounds?" Naruto questioned with worry. "Did someone stab you?!"

"Ah, no, no!" Haru denied in a rush. "My... my adoptive father got stabbed multiple times a couple days ago. You know how dangerous this country is nowadays, don't you?"

"I, uh... t-to be honest, I am not sure if it could help mending this type of wound," Hinata confessed, mentally going over the medicinal properties of her ointment's ingredients. "This is mostly for lighter wounds... i-it accelerates the healing of the skin, but it might not work as well for muscle or the fatty tissue a knife wound would damage... I never tested. I-I'm not even sure if it's a good idea to apply them to a wound like that."

"...Still, I believe it could be worth a shot," Haru said, frowning slightly. "I know that he will be trying to move around even if the wound hasn't fully healed, so I guess that at least the skin being restored is better than nothing. Do you have more of this?"

"I-I'm sorry, I only brought one with me and... I don't have all the materials to make another," the girl apologized, feeling awful about not being able to help.

"Why don't you give this one to her?" Naruto questioned, waving the little container in front of the girl's face. It seemed simple, from his perspective.

"B-but, what about you?"

The boy frowned at the girl's worried face. "I can live with a few scratches, y'know? Haru's father needs this way more than any of us!"

"Um... o-okay," the Hyuuga mumbled, ashamed, and Naruto passed the Hinata's little container to the long-haired girl.

"Thank you very much!" Haru bowed slightly to them, sporting a happy smile. She then patted her hips and shoved her hand inside one of her kimono's pockets, bringing out a moderate amount of money and shoving it into the bluenette's hands.

"P-please, I can't! I-it's too much!" the younger girl blurted out after seeing that it was almost thrice the price the ointment would have been sold for, if it had ever been for sale in the first place.

"I won't take no for an answer," Haru affirmed, and Hinata quickly gave up. "But, not wanting to impose more than I already did... I still need some of those herbs. My adoptive father's body is pretty weak right now, so I'm looking for ingredients to make a tea to help him recover his strength. Consider part of the money as advanced payment, ok?"

"Hmm... do you have some of them already?" Naruto asked with some trepidation. He knew a thing or three about caring for potted plants, but not nearly enough to identify random wild herbs by name. "Knowing what we're looking for would help."

"Of course," the brunette smiled. "Here are the ones I need..."

And for roughly the next fifteen minutes, the trio spent some time silently collecting the herbs Haru required; the two Konoha ninja blissfully unaware that they were betraying their own village by helping the other girl mend Zabuza's wounds.

Finally, as Naruto gave his last batch of plucked herbs to the older girl, Haru smiled. "Well, I believe that's about all I will need!" she announced happily. _'They are such good kids... pity they will have to die so soon.'_

"Mission accomplished!" Naruto grinned widely, eyeing Hinata's smiling face with his peripheral vision. "Nothing we Konoha ninja couldn't handle, hehe."

"I really must thank both of you for your help," Haru said sweetly before looking away, embarrassed. "And I guess I should say sorry too... I did get in the way of your training after all."

"Hah, no worries! It was for a good cause," Naruto waved her off.

 _'A good cause...'_ Haru wondered, just when she was about to get up and excuse herself. However, she decided to stay with the two genin for just a little while longer, as a burning question formed on her mind. "Say, Naruto-san, Hinata-san... why do you train so hard for?"

The question caught both of them off-guard, and the duo shared a glance for but a moment before a flushed Hinata broke eye contact.

 _'Cute,'_ the brunette smiled, _'but I guess she made him angry with those reactions.'_ At least, it was what Naruto's scowl suggested to her.

The blond's expression softened into a determined grin as he faced Haru again. "I train hard to become the strongest ninja in our village: the Hokage! If I'm the strongest, then everyone will have to acknowledge me!"

"...I wanted to become a strong leader for my clan, to change our ways and unite the clan," Hinata muttered sorrowfully, staring at the ground with a troubled expression.

This time it was with Haru that Naruto shared an uncertain glance, but as the older girl rose without pressing for further information, Naruto let the issue alone. Still, the blond couldn't help but wonder why did she say those words in the past tense.

"Well, I believe I must be going," the Yuki got up. "Thank you once again, Naruto-san and Hinata-san."

"...Heh, it was nothing! Naruto said, noting that his current companion had yet to raise her head.

"It wasn't nothing," the brunette insisted. "I'm sure my adoptive father will be healed in a flash, and it's all because of you two! If we get lucky, there won't even be a scar after I apply this little beauty," she said, examining the ointment's container as she began to walk away with the straw basket in her other hand.

That last sentence brought Hinata back to reality. "W-wait, Haru-san!"

Hearing her name, the Yuki turned around "What is it?"

"Um... I, uh, mentioned before that I n-never tested the ointment on deep wounds, r-right? So... I-I'm not sure how effective it will be in getting rid of the scar from something as invasive as a stab wound."

Haru's shoulders visibly sagged, as anger built up inside her at the prospect of her master walking around with ugly scars littering his "perfect" body.

"B-but," Hinata proceeded, "I know of something that will help you for sure! J-just wait a moment!"

With those words, the shy Hyuuga dashed off in the direction she had come from, leaving Naruto and Haru alone for the moment.

Though she believed it to be useless to the boy in the long run, Haru couldn't help herself from continuing their last conversation. "You said you wanted to be the Hokage, didn't you, Naruto-san?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah," he mumbled distractedly, eyes previously locked on to Hinata's back.

She smiled. "If you don't mind me saying, I think you are going about it the wrong way."

The boy blinked innocently, his blank expression all but screaming "I don't get it."

"Listen... from what you said, you are trying to become the Hokage only for your own sake. But as someone that is going to lead the village, don't you think you should have another goal?"

Naruto frowned. "What do you mean, miss?"

Haru's smile turned sad as she remembered a conversation she had with her brother on the day after their lives changed forever. "My father... my true father, he wasn't a ninja, but he knew how to fight. He... died, protecting me and my brother from bandits." The girl's eyes started to moisten, but she carried on. "I'd like to believe that at that moment, he was at his strongest. Stronger than he had ever been before."

"But... he lost, didn't he?"

"He did... but he died to protect his precious children. My point is... when you have someone that you hold dear to your heart, only them you can achieve true strength. The will to protect those dear to him is what made my father stand up and fight as we fled during that cold afternoon... and it was because he absolutely had to protect us that he managed to defeat every single one of the bandits before succumbing to his injuries. He had found true strength during that day."

Naruto's mind started to replay some of his own memories as Haru spoke. Memories of Hiruzen Sarutobi talking about the will of fire... memories of when Iruka had protected him from Mizuki's fuuma shuriken, risking his own life to ensure the survival of his favorite student... memories of the determined expressions Kakashi and Kurenai had in the few times he managed to look at the two as Zabuza attacked them in the woods... memories of reading the tale about the Fourth Hokage's sacrifice to protect the village...

"So... what I want to ask of you," the girl continued, "is that you give up on fighting this battle for your own sake, and find those people that you are willing to lay down your life for in order to protect. I believe that only then you will truly have a chance at achieving your dream, and especially if you discover those that are the most important people in your life."

"The... most important?"

There were only a few people that came to Naruto's mind at that moment. The old Sandaime Hokage, his former academy teacher and the two people that together worked at the Ichiraku Ramen stand. But... for some reason, he felt as if none of them were _exactly_ what Haru was talking about, almost as if he had come close enough to still be right, but missed the ultimate point of it all.

"Again, you spoke about becoming Hokage—about becoming the strongest—to have people recognizing you. But... what if there were people that acknowledged you for being just yourself? That accepted you just because you are Naruto? People that you didn't have to prove yourself to in order to be loved? These... these are people that you should truly be searching for."

The girl then felt sadness as she watched Naruto processing that her words. She could see it in his eyes that nobody immediately came to mind... and she knew for sure from just that dull blue glint that the young ninja standing before her was an orphan. _'No mother, no father... and, apparently, no real caretaker either... how horrible.'_

"Do you have anyone like that?" The boy raised his head to question her, and though he didn't mean to, everything from his tone to his body language expressed that it wasn't mere curiosity about Haru's life that led him to ask that. Naruto was looking for guidance.

Though the answer was clear to her, Haru still hesitated in answering. "...I do. Two, in fact"

Haku, her brother, had never needed any reason to love her, but did so out of his own will. Her master, Zabuza, didn't believe in such emotions... but from living with the man for so long, she understood from his mannerisms and small actions done over the years that he truly cared towards her and Haku both. Not as tools to be used and thrown away once they had no other purpose—despite his cold words, he couldn't fool her.

Before she could elaborate, though, Hinata came back, panting slightly.

"S-sorry for the wait...!"

Naruto noticed the bundle of flowers she had in her hands. "Those are lavender flowers, aren't they?"

"Yes... I, uh, saw them on the way here," the Hyuuga explained quickly, before facing Haru. "You can make an oil out of those flowers, and it can really help the skin to heal even from a stab wound or severe burns."

The older girl clapped her hands in front of herself, smiling. "Oh my... this will certainly be useful!"

"I hope it will," Hinata offered, watching as Haru placed the flowers on her basket.

"You know," Haru began, looking at Hinata again. "Going out of your way like that for a stranger... you're a pretty friendly person, aren't you?"

"Oh! Um... t-thank you!" Hinata managed, embarrassed by the compliment. Some of her nervous habits all kicked in at once, leaving the girl fiddling with her pointer fingers as she looked away. Still, turning her head didn't do much to hide her pink flush or her smile.

"I should be the one saying thank you," Haru giggled. She then noticed that she made the bluenette happy but uncomfortable as well, so she switched gears. "Anyways, about those flowers..."

Naruto then watched as Hinata and Haru started discussing the flower's healing properties and then how to produce an oil from them. His fellow genin was completely at ease talking about something she clearly understood a lot about.

Between Haru's comment and Hinata's odd reaction to it, he arrived at a conclusion and latched on to the idea that was forming in his head.

The pieces were falling into place and finally, he believed, the puzzle had been solved.

 _'She... for some reason, she wants to be my friend!'_

It hit him like a ton of bricks. It made sense—most of their interactions had her helping him somehow even though she had no reason to, and she had yet to truly insult him in any way even after defeating him—but... it also didn't make sense. But he knew he was on to something.

Naruto never imagined he would one day be thinking something like that. Why would anyone want his friendship without him having to earn it? He knew that his current bonds of "friendship" didn't come for free. He had to defeat Kiba in battle before the Inuzuka mellowed out, and both Sasuke and Sakura were only making an effort because they now understood how the bonds between squadmates could be important... not because of who he was.

Hinata wasn't part of his team. Hinata had defeated him in combat. Hinata... wanted to be his friend. Why?

And his confusion aside, all of it only made Naruto angrier. _'The why doesn't matter... she knows about the Kyuubi. There' nothing else that could explain why she acts like that! She is too scared to really... or, maybe her family doesn't want her to get close to someone like me?'_ He had never interacted that much with any Hyuuga before meeting Hinata, but he could recognize a clan of stick-in-the-muds when he saw one. _'Hinata is their heiress, isn't she?'_

Perhaps if he had been alone he might have allowed a small, bitter laugh to escape his lips, but he had a better grip on his emotions than that. _'A clan heiress hanging out with a demon... what a bad joke.'_

He couldn't, however, stop the anger that was blossoming inside him at the thought that the Kyuubi was once again messing with his life... and he was lost so deeply in his thoughts—in his emotions—that he almost failed to catch Haru saying goodbye.

"—and thanks again, both of you!"

The older girl waved, and Hinata mirrored the action, though with more restraint. "Farewell, Haru-san."

As Haru stepped away from the two genin, she couldn't help the unease that turning her back on them brought. Not because she really wanted to continue talking to them, but because she could feel the smallest of hints of killing intent leaking out of Naruto.

 _'I wonder... what is up with those two kids?'_

Haru had initially only approached them to confirm if they were or not the enemy and possibly gather some intel while at it. She had been spying on them ever since Hinata had arrived, and actually found the situation amusing up until the moment where Naruto's frustration became pronounced. For some reason she couldn't explain, she felt the instinctual need to step between the two to give them a chance to collect their bearings after she saw the situation wouldn't go anywhere.

She knew those two kids would likely be nothing more than corpses in just a few days, but still... if they could be happy while they still had the time, why not? It was a small mercy, she believed. Unlike the jonin that would be fighting her master, she knew the six genin had just been dealt a bad hand and really were no big threat to the mission as a whole, at least not now that Zabuza knew about Team 8's tracking abilities.

But given the aura she faintly felt coming from the blond, she understood her actions regarding that didn't mean much in the end. Still, she didn't come out of that clearing empty-handed—roping the two into helping her had been a spur of the moment decision—and the fact that she managed to guide the young Naruto into another path, just in case he survived, also made her happy.

Looking at the bundle of lavender flowers that were inside her basket and barely registering that someone was passing her by, Haru let herself wonder if she had bought Hinata enough time to recompose herself...

If you asked the Hyuuga, she'd easily say "No."

Watching the kimono-clad girl disappearing amidst the trees, Hinata knew that she had nowhere to run... and Naruto didn't have a very friendly expression, either. It made Hinata anxious, nervous, because she had no idea of how to deal with that situation. For all of the time she had spent observing her crush, she had never seen him like that, but the glint in his eyes scared her a little. Was Naruto planning on continuing their conversation? Perhaps he would give her and himself some space?

...Was a friendship between them nothing more than a naive hope, in the end? And was it just Hinata, or was the blue tone of Naruto's eyes darker than she remembered?

"I'm going to train some more," the Uzumaki eventually said, breaking their silence with a voice that lacked the usual warmth it carried as he turned away from the girl to face a random tree.

"W-wait, I could use my By—"

"Don't worry, I can handle this myself," Naruto retorted without even looking back. He was sure that he'd feel even angrier, and even guilty, if he saw the hurt he knew he would find in Hinata's face.

But it was going to be for the best. If a bond between them was impossible... then cutting ties with her right then would be better for both, he decided. Though the question of why she had even tried to reach out to him was intriguing... if nothing could come out of it, then he figured it was better to not waste any time thinking about it.

Trying to calm himself down, Naruto sent his chakra to the soles of his feet, aiming for the exact amount Hinata had taught him to use. With that done, he began to run as fast as he could towards his tree of choice—which hadn't even been the one he had been using ever since he destroyed his first one.

But he couldn't get his mind to clear itself fully. As his world tilted so that he was walking towards the sky, his mind wandered.

Hinata was a nice person, that much he now knew for sure. So far, she had only been kind to him... and he would have liked to have her as a friend. But he couldn't... and he knew exactly who was to blame for that. It was not his fault, like he had thought once or twice while trying to figure out the shy Hyuuga.

 _'It's all YOUR fault... **you** **damn fox!** '_

Cracking noises filled the blond's ears, and before he could understand what was going on, he was already flying through the air, only stopping when his back collided violently against another tree's trunk, forcefully emptying his lungs.

With his concentration lost and body weakened by the impact, Naruto couldn't focus enough chakra around his torso and especially on his head to save himself from a bad fall, if not a lethal one. Still, his ears were working fine, and he not only heard a feminine-sounding gasp, but the voice of someone he hadn't been expecting to show up just yet.

"Naruto!"

 _'Huh? Kiba!?'_

The blond was barely able to see a gray blur bouncing off of a tree to catch him in midair, landing safely on the ground.

"Y'know," Kiba deactivated the Four Legs Technique, "I was trying to save the princess carry for when I get a girl for myself," the Inuzuka commented cheekily, trying to lighten the mood for everyone. He saw that Hinata looked pretty out of it even before Naruto was sent flying, and he himself almost had a heart attack when he saw how close the Uzumaki came to being impaled by a tree branch only a few inches higher than where he struck the tree.

"Put... me down!" Naruto gasped as he tried to pump some oxygen into his system, and Kiba complied. "Thanks..."

"You need to be more careful, dude. Look at how much you scared Hinata," the Inuzuka said with a teasing smile. It was dropped fast, as Naruto and Hinata looked at each other's eyes for a moment before both broke away, leaving Kiba to wonder why there was such a palpably heavy tension between them. Hinata looked guilty, and Naruto had an expression that would be more fitting on Sasuke's face. _'Oh boy... something went wrong here.'_

Naruto walked away without saying anything, searching for the tree he had used up until this last botched attempt. _'Alright... I gotta remember what Sakura-chan said. Calm down... and try again.'_

Unable to contain himself, Kiba moved closer to Hinata whispered to his crestfallen teammate: "What the hell happened? Did he do something to you?"

"He... nothing happened," the girl muttered, looking partially through her bangs at Kiba. "He didn't do anything. I-It was my fault."

Those last words made the Inuzuka frown. Past experiences with Hinata made him unable to trust the girl's judgment over her own actions, given her pessimistic opinion of herself.

Hinata didn't maintain eye contact for long, but when her gaze dropped she saw a familiar-looking scroll in her teammate's hands and perked up. "Ah, you brought it to me!"

"Huh? Oh yeah, you forgot it." He passed the scroll with the elemental training equipment to the girl. "I thought you would want to train while we are here... at this point you can't—I mean, me and Naruto just need to figure out how to maintain the right chakra levels, so you can do something productive instead of being stuck with us."

The girl nodded, mumbling something even he struggled to interpret as a "thank you", and walked away to sit by a random tree's roots.

Kiba heard a whine from the puppy that clung to his jacket's collar and shook his head. "No, boy... it's better if we don't do anything for now. She needs some space," he muttered with a mix of annoyance and worry. _'Dammit. But I know someone that will try to ask her about it anyways. I'll hear it all then,'_ the Inuzuka decided, sparing another glance to Hinata before starting out his training.

Just as he turned around, though, he remembered that there was one thing he could try. "Y'know... go for it. But don't bother her too much, okay?" he said, placing Akamaru on the ground. The little dog barked, as if saying "leave it to me!" and ran towards Hinata.

Kiba could only hope that the famed ability that dogs have of lifting people's spirits would work one more time...

* * *

While in almost every other day of her life Sakura would have been ecstatic at the chance of some alone time with her crush, the only female member of Team 7 could just wonder how she did not even register the fact that the moment had arrived until they were about to enter Tazuna's door again.

Their other companions had remained behind, as Shino wanted to check on the condition of the bugs he had left behind days ago, exchanging them for others if they happened to be too tired. Tazuna merely tagged along as a test dummy, to ensure that Kurenai's genjutsu was still working as it should and if there wasn't a need to cast it again. Though the old man had been immune to the illusion due to being inside the affected area at first, it was simple (for Kurenai anyways) to change the still-working genjutsu to affect and latter NOT affect the bridge builder.

As they had no such duties, Sasuke and Sakura just walked along quietly, in a surprisingly comfortable silence... for Sakura. Sasuke couldn't help but feel wary around the pinkette after the trauma he suffered at her hands—or rather, at her foot—earlier that morning. He masked it well, though.

 _'Well, nothing I can do about that now,'_ she shrugged mentally, opening the door while another part of her was pseudo-silently fuming over the lost opportunity. Sure, it had been only a couple minutes that they had spent together... but a lot of things could have happened in those two minutes. Marriage proposals didn't necessarily need more than two minutes to happen, for example...

"Oh, you're here," Kakashi muttered from the living room's couch, not even looking up from his book. "Was today productive?"

"Hn. Where are the others?"

Kakashi raised an eyebrow as he looked up at Sasuke. "Naruto is taking a nap in the guest room, and Kiba is in the kitchen with Hinata. Tsunami-san is taking a bath right now, so Hinata offered to handle dinner until she returns... but that's not what you want to know, is it?"

Sasuke's eyes narrowed slightly as Sakura turned to him.

"What is he talking about, Sasuke-kun?"

"What Sasuke wants to know," Kakashi said with some amusement, "is how far Kiba and Naruto managed to climb today. I'll just say that they are pretty close to you by now..."

The Uchiha remained silent as a weird kind of anger started to well up inside him. He knew that feeling well; it was completely different from how he felt when other people pissed him off. It was... like only a small part of him was angry, but it was much angrier than the situation would have allowed for. As if the feeling was somehow dulled, something he could only compare to how the pain of loneliness became more bearable as time passed, and that was still way too different.

But he had always felt that way around Naruto, somehow...

"...Huh? Sasuke-kun, where are you going?" Sakura asked upon seeing her teammate backtracking.

"I will be training some more," he answered simply, closing the door on the pinkette's face before she could retort.

A vein throbbed on Sakura's forehead, but she knew that Sasuke wasn't in danger this time; genjutsu training had not been very taxing this time, so chakra exhaustion wouldn't be likely.

Kakashi merely hid a smile that was both amused and melancholic beneath his mask. _'I suppose he is my counterpart in this new Team 7, but when he gets competitive like that it almost looks like there are two Obitos in the team... I wonder if it's in the blood?'_

Sakura sighed. "Gonna see how Hinata and Kiba are holding up, then." It was not like she could take a bath now; there were two bathrooms with showers in the house, but she had left her things, such as shampoo, on Tsunami-san's.

Opening the door to the kitchen, she saw Kiba leaning against a wall beside the sink, whereas Hinata was in front of the stove, stirring a pot's contents with a wooden spoon.

"Hey guys."

"Hey," Kiba greeted her back with a half-hearted wave. Akamaru was just as happy as always to bark a "Hi", though.

"So... how did today go?" the pinkette asked openly. Kiba, however, knew his opinion wasn't what Sakura cared about.

"Welp, guess that's my cue to get out," the boy shrugged, moving to leave the room. "Shino's outside with Kurenai-sensei, right?"

With a nod from the slightly confused Sakura, the Inuzuka left the two girls alone, his partner eagerly following him. "Just remember what I said to you!" he called out before closing the door

Sakura shrugged, as the words obviously weren't meant for her, and went to grab a cup of water. She savored the drink in silence. "So?" the girl asked once she was done.

"...I made a breakthrough regarding elemental training, but I suppose that's not what you want to talk about," Hinata answered without turning back.

"Of course not," Sakura rolled her eyes, though she became slightly suspicious. "Did you get anywhere with the knucklehead?"

"Naruto-kun and I... had a disagreement."

Sakura then understood then why Hinata seemed off. "Did he do anything to you? I mean, Naruto's impulsive at times but don't take what he says too seri—"

Sakura's words died in her throat when Hinata began to laugh quietly. It had been for only a moment, but it still made the pinkette unable to continue.

"It doesn't matter... he was completely in the right. T-this... this was going to happen at one point anyways."

Sakura gulped. She knew she wouldn't like the answer, but she still felt the need to ask "What... what happened, Hinata?"

The Hyuuga didn't answer right away, instead closing the lid of the pot she had been watching over and then glancing at a nearby wall clock. _'15 minutes...'_

With the time memorized, Hinata left the wooden spoon on a nearby plate and sat at the table, prompting Sakura to do the same before starting to recount the day's events.

...Sakura wasn't surprised to see that she had been right. "Damn... and you were doing so well up until now, too..."

Hinata shook her head. "No... you don't understand. Every time I spoke with him so far, i-it was all leading up to this." She almost wanted to call it fate, or destiny, but those particular words brought her memories that she would rather not remember at that time.

It all made Sakura scowl and rise from her chair. "That Naruto... I'm gonna talk to—!"

"P-please, don't go and wake him up," Hinata interrupted calmly. "He had a tiring day... and, and it w-wouldn't change anything."

"But Hinata, he just doesn't get that talking to other people is difficult," Sakura pleaded. "Look, I won't hit him or anything, I just want to help explain it to him!"

After hearing Hinata's confession about her childhood, Sakura knew she was in a good enough position to make Naruto understand her friend's social struggles better; perhaps it wasn't her place, but she couldn't sit idly and let things end like that.

"He... he pointed out that I don't have as much difficulty talking to others. I'm not the most outgoing girl, yes, but... with Naruto-kun it is much worse." Hinata lowered her head. "I was so scared of making him see me like my clan sees me, that I brought it upon myself without realizing it."

It was funny, Hinata thought. It hurt a lot to be rejected by Naruto, and this was something she has already expected... but having him, the person that unknowingly helped her so much just by giving her an example to follow, turn his back to her and walk away... didn't hurt as much as she had imagined. Perhaps this was because Akamaru and later Kiba made efforts to cheer her up. Or maybe because deep down she had always doubted that anything would ever come out of trying to talk to him.

It was nothing in comparison to the pain she felt when her father did the same right after her mother succumbed to illness, and she survived that. This was very well within her abilities to endure. To endure and move forward, as Naruto had taught her to do.

The hollowness she felt was new, though, and that had yet to go away entirely.

"Wow. For someone that spent so much time... observing him, you managed to miss something incredibly obvious," Sakura pointed out flatly as Hinata looked up to her again. "Naruto would never have that kind of opinion about _anyone_."

The pinkette then bit her tongue, stopping herself from pointing out that being a failure would likely only make it easier to become closer to Naruto because he could sympathize with her plight; the comment would be incredibly insensitive of her. _'If anything, being a genius would only get in the way... even though Sasuke-kun still found a way to bond with him regardless.'_

Humorlessly, Hinata laughed a bit. "I suppose you're right... but there's nothing I can do about it now."

That remark made Sakura sigh. The one thing she knew Hinata hadn't shared with her and Team 8 that night—and that perhaps even Kurenai was in the dark about—was how much Naruto inspired and influenced her. But Sakura had paid enough attention to the girl's wording to know the Uzumaki had an effect on her. _'There's no way she can explain herself without practically confessing... and since she's apparently in a weird sort of denial about liking him, that's not a workable plan even if Hinata could go through that conversation.'_

And that knowledge meant the pinkette knew exactly what would be the best button to push in this case. Out of every single one of her hyperactive teammate's boastings, she knew which one had impacted Hinata the most; it was simply too obvious.

"So... in other words, you are giving up."

As expected, Hinata faltered... but still held. "Is it truly giving up when you already lost?"

Sakura's palms struck the table before she even knew what was going on. "It is giving up when you can try again!" She huffed, giving herself a couple seconds to calm down before she startled Hinata too much. "Like I already said... once Naruto can understand you, he won't be angry. You said he thought he was doing something wrong, but from his reaction, I get he thinks that _he_ is the wrong. That your problem isn't with something he did, but with himself. That idiot just needs someone to enlighten him."

There was a mix of emotions on Hinata's face as Sakura explained her reasoning, and as the bluenette sank into her chair, the hints of relief, regret and hope were more prevalent than sadness."...P-perhaps. I... may try to approach him again one day, j-just not anytime soon."

"But Hinata—!"

"L-look, I have an idea," Hinata held her hand. "If... if I can't express myself when talking, I c-could write a letter to him. Or something. I just need time to put my thoughts into words, m-maybe when we aren't on such a dangerous mission..."

With some reluctance, Sakura eventually nodded. "Maybe that could work," she muttered, displeased. "We do have more pressing issues to focus on, I guess..."

"Right," Hinata agreed with a weak smile, relieved that her friend had stopped pressing the issue. The bluenette then got up and began to walk towards the refrigerator, inwardly building up some courage to make use of what Kiba had overheard a few minutes ago.

Meanwhile, Sakura started to fidget, playing with her hair nervously. "...Still, isn't there something I can do to help?"

"H-help with w-what?" Hinata stuttered, unused to lying so shamelessly like that.

"Um, I... well, I guess if I had just eaten my breakfast in silence earlier this morning, none of this would have happened. I know you said Naruto would eventually start to ask questions anyways," she said quickly before Hinata could interrupt, "but maybe things would have turned out differently if I hadn't been so... pushy."

In truth, Sakura was mostly wanting to get rid of the guilt she began to feel as Hinata told her exactly how wrong things had gone with Naruto, and struggled to accept that this time she had to stay put lest she made things even worse.

Grabbing a pot that she knew Tsunami had left the previous day's leftovers in, Hinata quickly closed the refrigerator and went about reheating its contents.

 _"If you don't make it clear to her that you disliked what she did, trust me: it will happen again," s_ he remembered Kiba's words, and what he had suggested afterwards. Hinata wasn't sure if she could—or should—pull off something like that, but decided to trust in her friend's words and at least try to.

Making use of the fact she had her back to Sakura, Hinata took a deep breath and steeled herself.

"I think you've helped me enough for a day."

The frigid tone of the Hyuuga's voice made Sakura wince, realizing that Kiba had been correct.

"...I'm sorry," Sakura eventually gathered the courage to speak. "When... I never imagined things would go off-rails like this. Now you're mad at me, aren't you?"

"...No. Not anymore, at least," Hinata confessed. Though she felt annoyed with her friend when on her way to find Naruto, she knew the only guilty party regarding the events that followed was herself, as it was her hesitation that became her downfall. Still, she understood that Sakura didn't believe as much and was looking for a way to "repent," and Hinata had just the right task for the pinkette.

"But, there _is_ something you can do to make us even."

Silence issued, but Sakura was too curious to let it linger for too long. "What is it?!"

"Sasuke-san has gone to the forest to train some more, hasn't he?"

"Yeah... so what?"

"He will miss dinner..."

Sakura, perhaps due to being a little tired after a day of mostly theoretical lessons, took a fair bit of time to understand where the conversation was headed. By the time the food Hinata had just taken from the refrigerator became hot once again, Sakura figured out the answer on her own and began to pale.

"Y-you can't be serious! I mean, I can't—"

The pinkette's never finished that phrase, as the shy Hyuuga turned around, wearing her best imitation of her father's glare. It was enough to silence Sakura instantly.

"I will _not_ be the only one that has to go through that."

* * *

 _'Ugh, I guess I deserved it...'_ Sakura thought, walking through the now dark woods while holding the pot of food Hinata had re-heated. On her kunai pouch was a scroll with cooking utensils sealed: cutlery and two bowls, one for Sasuke and another for herself.

 _'But there was no need to rub it in my face like that,'_ she remembered with some annoyance how Kiba had shot a knowing smirk at her as she left Tazuna's house, leaving the "I told you so" all but unsaid.

Given that the dynamics between herself and Sasuke were drastically different from Naruto and Hinata's, she knew the chances of her burning that bridge were incredibly low. In hindsight, she wondered if Hinata was aware of that and was just trying to help, or just pushed her to go through the same experience in hopes of seeing her crash and burn. _'Nah, Hinata's not like that... but I know that mutt had a hand in this. There's no way Hinata would come up with something like this on her own... heck, she isn't the type to hold grudges, either.'_

Once again, Kiba's smirk flashed on her mind. The Inuzuka didn't show any sort of surprise at knowing where she was headed and why, unlike Shino and Kurenai. That he was involved somehow was clear to Sakura. Nonetheless, she owned it to Hinata to try and make some use of her situation. In the end, her problem in going near Sasuke lately was similar to Hinata's own struggles to even speak with Naruto, so it could benefit everyone involved if she were to be successful.

 _'And I do need to follow my own advices. I pushed Hinata to conquer her fears even though I was just running away.'_ Thinking back, Sakura realized that even what she had spoken about Naruto to Hinata in the kitchen moments ago could reflect her own situation with her crush. Deep down, she was aware that Sasuke likely didn't hold her failure to help when Zabuza attacked against her, so why let that hold her back? _'Maybe I'll have better luck than Hinata did...'_

Kurenai's speech back on Training Ground 5 had stayed her hand so far, but while it made Sasuke more open to her presence... it hadn't been enough to make him take the initiative to interact with herself as he had done with Naruto. "It's up to me to go on the offensive... and that's exactly what I'm going to do!"

Determined, Sakura kept walking, until she reached the same clearing where she knew Sasuke would have been at. Or should've been at, given that there was nobody there.

"...Where is he?"

The pinkette walked around the area aimlessly looking everywhere, but there wasn't even a hint of someone else's presence. She began to feel worried, wondering if perhaps something had happened to her Uchiha teammate... and just before the thought passed across her head, she heard a loud thud behind her and instantly turned around.

"What are you—"

Sakura shrieked, leaving Sasuke's question unfinished, and his ears hurting. It could have been worse; if the girl hadn't been holding their food she might have punched him or even used a weapon on instinct.

"Holy shit!" Sakura shouted, rightfully angry. "Did you have to land behind me like that?! You scared me!"

"...It's dark. I didn't recognize you right away," he said, looking away at the last moment in slight embarrassment.

Sakura realized that was the closest thing to an apology that she would be getting. "...No, it's fine," she shook her head, wondering when her heart would stop pounding from the scare. "That was a good move on your part, I guess. _If_ I were an enemy."

"...You didn't answer my question."

"I... came to bring dinner."

Given that her entire body language screamed of discomfort, Sasuke knew Sakura hadn't been the one to come up with this idea. The alternative made a small smirk appear on his face. "Heh... Hyuuga made you do this, didn't she?" Sakura looked shocked for a moment, before nodding once.

Sasuke could only wonder if Sakura had made the mistake of pressing Hinata while the girl was in the kitchen of all places...

"I-I suppose it's only fair... and training with your stomach empty wouldn't have done you any good." The girl's brow furred, forcefully switching gears to avoid the topic. "I bet you aren't getting very far with tree climbing this night, right?"

"That's..." Sasuke sighed. "Yeah. How did you know?"

Disappointed, Sakura shook her head. "Did you forget about what I said about the composition of chakra? You need physical energy to mold it properly, Sasuke-kun. If you are hungry then things won't work out," she scolded him, with a lot more calm than she would have if dealing with Naruto, Sasuke noted.

"Then let's eat before it gets too dark," Sasuke said, moving towards a part of the wooded area that was brighter, due to the lack of trees and branches to stop the last bits of sunlight from getting in.

As Sakura went about unsealing what was supposed to be Hinata's cooking scroll, Sasuke couldn't help but thank Kurenai for the events that happened on Training Ground 5. Despite still not liking that she had messed with such sensitive memories and even his fears, he knew that Sakura would have been hyper at the private dinner they were having if not for Kurenai's stunt with the Itachi genjutsu.

Even though he was quite sure that camping in the dark with reheated food was far from whatever romantic scenario the girl fantasized about.

But Sakura was very subdued around him, and Sasuke couldn't figure out the reason why. From his part, he understood that the awkwardness came from his crippled social life. Itachi dominated his existence too intensely for other people to have mattered... but Sakura had friends before. At first, he considered that perhaps it was shame for how obsessive she acted towards himself, but she had shown no such behavior when interacting with Naruto.

"So," Sakura began after a few instants of quietude, "how did you like today's lesson?"

"It was fine," the Uchiha shrugged. "I didn't think I'd get too much out of genjutsu lessons, but this was one worth not training for a day."

Allowing Kiba and especially Naruto to catch up to him was unacceptable, but he didn't regret going along with Sakura's machinations.

That day, Kurenai had taught about genjutsu that relied on the user's imagination to work, rather than having specific predetermined effects. It was a complex lesson that covered the bases the illusions needed to work without interference, how to create "points" where the illusion could shift based on the victim's choices, how to dull the senses that could give the illusion away... and, of course, such knowledge was put to use with more D-ranked genjutsu. Shino was the ideal target, who knew exactly when and how an illusion had been placed on him thanks to his bugs, and could judge whether the techniques were convincing.

"Oh, she did say something about the Sharingan's genjutsu working that way, right?" Sakura asked, to which Sasuke nodded as he ate.

"She probably asked Kakashi-sensei for help on that one," he theorized, remembering how the Genjutsu Mistress admitted to being unfamiliar with his _future_ dojutsu during their first meeting.

"You got lucky that she did. I'm not too sure that Kakashi would give such a lesson to help you out, even though that is probably the biggest reason he became our sensei," Sakura commented. Given the jonin's apparent dislike of mince-meating information and overall laziness, Sakura was actually rather surprised he had given such a throughout lecture on the elements the other day. _'He can actually be a decent teacher when he gets bothered to try...'_

"Hn," Sasuke agreed. "And what about you? Was the lesson you wanted so much worth kicking me, in the end?"

"Eheheheh... I didn't actually say sorry for that one yet, right...?" After a quick apology, which Sasuke did not react to outwardly much to the girl's annoyance, Sakura answered his question. "You know... I'm not that happy with the lesson. Not that it wasn't interesting—it was! But I dunno, I guess I was expecting something more substantial. Though... it's not like it would matter. I'd be useless during the rest of our mission anyways, stuck defending Tazuna-san with Shino..." she muttered, taking a bite out of her food.

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "You do know only the jonin would be fighting, don't you?"

While her mouth was full, Sakura made sure to give Sasuke the flattest look she could manage. "...Really, Sasuke-kun? Have you forgotten about that fake hunter-nin guy? There's no way that our sensei will split up, especially not with that mist. At least a few of us will end up fighting him, and that's while hoping he is Zabuza's only backup."

Sasuke shrugged off her remark. "I was unconscious at the time; did you really expect me to remember that?" The girl flinched for a moment, and he chose backtrack a little. "You are right, however. Fighting on that mist will be difficult..."

It had been an amazing stroke of luck that Zabuza had chosen to toy with them and to give them a minimal chance of fighting back. If it wasn't for his careless actions, Kakashi and Kurenai would have never arrived on time, Sasuke believed. He didn't know for sure because he only got a second-hand account from Naruto while climbing trees the previous mornings, but it was a fair guess that the mist would have doomed them all if it had been in play.

"..."

Sasuke watched warily as his companion refused to say anything in response and went back to her food. She had a weird expression on her face and he couldn't gauge what exactly could be passing through her head at that moment. The pinkette seemed conflicted about something... and eventually, once both were basically done with their meals, the girl began to speak. "I... Sasuke-kun, I need to say something to you."

Sakura correctly assumed that the raven's raised brow was a silent "go on" and averted her gaze to the grass for a brief moment.

"I'm sorry for letting you down before..."

That Sasuke couldn't understand what the pinkette meant already told him that she was probably overthinking something. "What are you talking about?"

"Back there with Zabuza... you trusted me to give you an opening, but I didn't understand right away what you were trying to do! Because... because of that your Great Fireball missed and, and then you got atta—!"

"Sakura!"

"Uh, w-what...?" the girl asked, dazed.

"Breathe."

"A... alright."

Sakura took a moment to recompose herself while Sasuke watched her warily. While she had been talking her voice had started to get louder and that distressed expression he had seen on her face before the Demon Brothers attack returned. He simply couldn't stand there idly while the girl freaked out like that.

On the back of his mind, he realized at that moment that he had begun to actually care at one point...

"Sorry about that..." the girl apologized uneasily and went back into silence. Sakura knew that Sasuke deserved to know why she almost had a panic attack at that moment, given that she had apparently worried him... but knowing that he had much bigger ghosts haunting him made her unable to open up. She had no right to bother him with her much smaller problems...

 _"No... you don't understand."_ Hinata's words suddenly echoed in her mind. _"Every time I spoke with him so far, i-it was all leading up to this."_

 _'Am... am I doing the same mistake?'_ she wondered. Her situation was different from Hinata's, but the thought refused to leave her...

And while Sakura debated with herself, Sasuke frowned. The girl's silence was becoming irritant, and he found himself almost missing the pink-haired chatterbox that she had been for the better part of his life. This was something he never imagined he would think... ever.

"I don't blame you," he spoke. "And even if I did, part of it is on me. You figured out that what I wanted even though we had never talked about using this kind of strategy... and besides, we were fighting a jonin. I didn't even expect to hit him."

In truth, while part of him had dared to hope, he hadn't been optimistic enough to believe a man that apparently was good enough to slay both Kakashi and Kurenai could have been defeated so easily... but the instinct to survive still lead him to try.

Though Sakura still felt conflicted, a small smile of relief blossomed on her face. "Thank you... I was being silly, wasn't I?"

After the incident at breakfast, Sasuke held himself back from answering that. Nodding noncommittally and with a little hesitation—perfectly hidden by his usual stoic expression—he decided to steer the conversation to a more sensitive topic. "It's just like what happened with my brother during that genjutsu."

As he had expected, the girl's smile fell immediately, but he didn't falter. "I didn't really expect any of us to actually come even close to hurting them."

"I suppose you didn't expect any of us to be completely useless either," she shot back without missing a beat.

Done with his food, Sasuke lowered the bowl to the grass. "Kurenai-sensei went to talk with you the day after she arrived..." he trailed off, leaving his question unspoken and giving Sakura the chance to brush it off if she didn't want to talk about it.

She didn't, but refused his offer. "Y-yeah... she wanted to apologize to me again about the genjutsu and for not thoroughly thinking about the impacts it could have on us. It was kinda awkward, though."

The Uchiha frowned. Now, after watching both jonin-sensei for a while, he was sure the two had been aware that their current mission was much more than a simple C-rank from the very beginning. There were other hints, but the incident with the World of Nightmares illusion and the lecture that followed were simply too extreme for a jonin to use without really needing to; there were better ways of giving the same lesson to Team 7, but he knew none of them would work as well in the short-term,

Sakura merely though the boy was somewhat angered by the older kunoichi's "carelessness", and continued. "Then she went to say some stuff about how "failing today cannot stop you from trying to succeed tomorrow" and similar stuff. She also asked for more details on why I passed out and I told her."

"You passed out?" Internally, Sasuke cursed himself, and then cursed Naruto. He should have taken the time to get Hinata's account of the battle rather than settling just with the Uzumaki's. He thought that Sakura had been knocked out somehow, but he never actually broached that subject with the blond.

"I... Zabuza... when he kicked you into that tree, what happened in that genjutsu came up again in my mind even though I didn't want to think about it. I think that and the killer intent overwhelmed me..." she muttered with some shame, but unlike a certain Hyuuga she knew, Sakura refused to simply assume what Sasuke was thinking. Even though the darkening sky made his black orbs harder to see, her gaze was firmly trained on them.

There was no repulsion, no disappointment and not even anger.

"After I said that I asked her about how the battle ended up and... well, one thing led to another and we kind got off-topic when she explained what that hunter-nin did," the pinkette explained, more relaxed than before. "Kurenai-sensei also said a few things about therapy to help me... and even some form of therapy involving genjutsu."

Sasuke noted the skepticism in her voice. "I think this could help you."

"But... look, it was just an illusion, right? N-nothing really happened, so... I dunno. Isn't it a little excessive to have therapy just for that?"

"If it's affecting you enough, then it isn't such a small issue. Didn't you think you were over what happened before we faced Zabuza?" Sakura opened her mouth to retort but quickly realized Sasuke was telling the truth. Could she risk such an event happening again?

"And... I know this wasn't exactly Kurenai's intention, but that genjutsu ended up helping me. You shouldn't dismiss her input just because of one bad experience."

The girl's eyes widened as her mouth almost hit the floor. Luckily, she had been done with her meal a while ago. "That _helped_ you? But how?!"

The boy took a few moments to gather his thoughts before speaking.

"It's true that it was a violent illusion; Itachi was just as ruthless as the real deal would have been. But... I lost to him." Sasuke raised his head, and to his luck, he caught a glimpse of the crescent moon on the purple-orange sky. "In that moment, some part of me made peace with the fact that I had failed. Between that and the fight, I had a way of releasing some of this... this _fury_ that was inside me. It was... cathartic."

"But... you still want your revenge, don't you?"

"Of course," he answered instantly, now looking at her again, almost as if piercing the girl's soul with his gaze. "That release wasn't enough to keep the nightmares away or erasing the past. Itachi will die and it will be by my hands, just as my parents and clan's deaths were by his."

Sakura shuddered at the intensity of her teammate's voice; at the blazing fire she could see in his eyes. Black and all-consuming...

"But now I feel much better than before. It's like I can see things more clearly, almost as if these feelings—this burden—were slowly consuming me." Sasuke paused. _'No, not almost... they were. Perhaps still are,'_ he conceded. Only after killing Itachi he would be able to correctly judge that.

"I... see." Sakura had never expected that Sasuke would open up to her like that. She had seen glimpses of it before: Sasuke's introduction to Kakashi and the ferocity he had displayed when confronting Itachi both verbally and physically being the biggest. The first one she had just plainly ignored as she swooned over how her crush was so cool and manly despite a small part of her acknowledging how messed up his ambition was... and, of course, she had been far too scared to actually let all the implications of Kurenai's illusion to sink in right away.

But his words allowed her to step back, look at the big picture, and understand just how much that quest for vengeance ruled over Sasuke's mind. _''His only reason for living is this revenge. How horrible...'_

And while Sakura was processing all of that, Sasuke began to feel silly. Even though he had ignored trivial things such as making friendships and small talk with others, he was sure that he had killed the conversation right there. Just what kind of meaningful answer could she give after hearing what he had said?

 _'I really suck at this,'_ he thought. _'I guess I'll just get up and go back to training then.'_

It seemed like the best plan to end the conversation as it obviously wasn't going to go anywhere, but Sakura had other plans.

"Sasuke-kun. You know, I was serious about what I said the day before we left." The boy's blank stare forced her to elaborate. "About helping you against your brother one day... I meant it. I'm weak right now, but one day I will be someone you can count on watching your back no matter who stands in our way!"

Just as her words implied, Sasuke could see that the girl's green eyes held no hints of deceit. Instead, there was only determination in there... and it made no sense at all to him. It hadn't before, but he had been so overwhelmed by the promise his teammates had made that he hadn't dwelt on it.

And yet, later that night he had. Though Naruto wasn't with them, Sasuke could answer some of his questions right there, right then.

"But why? Why would you say something like that? This... isn't your problem."

"Because I want to help you be free. Of this hate, of these nightmares... of those ghosts. It's killing you from inside out, Sasuke-kun." Sasuke's eyes widened as he watched a slight blush crept up on Sakura's features, leaving her cheeks resembling the shade of her hair. Her sorrowful expression still held, however. "A-and I'm doing this for myself as well. Not to mention Naruto promised to help you too, and you two need someone to make sure Itachi doesn't win the fight without even doing anything because you killed each other," she said in a hurry, trying to lighten the mood

Slowly, a small, amused smile crept up on his face. "I guess if there is anyone obnoxious enough to distract me like that even during such a fight, it would be him."

"Right?" Sakura answered with a smile of her own, though her face was still slightly rosed. It fell slightly when Sasuke's did, as he got up to loom over her.

"But I'm not in this just for revenge anymore."

"You're... not?"

He shook his head. "When he was about to kill me, on that genjutsu... I asked him why."

The girl's features hardened. She knew that whatever his question had been, a figment of his own imagination corrupted by another person couldn't have given him the real answer.

"At the time I didn't have the strength to say anything but that word, but once I knew that I couldn't avenge anyone anymore, I just felt like knowing the truth. Why he killed our clan. Why he killed our parents. Why he just attacked me instead of killing me too... why he changed so much from the kind brother I grew up with..."

For the first time in many years, Sasuke let himself remember the gentle person that he came to know as his brother. Sakura could see in his eyes just how vulnerable he was at that moment and looked away, feeling as if she was intruding on something she had no right to. Not only because of his words in particular, but because of what lay beneath them.

 _'Was he even aware of what he said...?'_

"I never once stopped to ask myself his reasons to betray everyone and everything," he continued.

"And now that you have questions, you want answers, don't you?" Sakura asked, looking up to him again just in time to see him nodding before turning back.

"And I'm not resting until I have them."

He did not wait for an answer after that. Focusing his chakra, he soon took off towards a specific tree in the woods, drawing a kunai as he ran.

The girl watched him, torn on the inside as she remembered one sentence in particular that had stood out to her.

 _"Why he just attacked me instead of killing me too..."_

Sakura refused to acknowledge how his tone had changed at that moment, and what his wording implied... but just the same, from those words she had just found a new reason to be there for him when the time came to face Itachi.

Feeling determination welling up inside herself once more, Sakura quickly sealed the bowls and pot, pocketing the scroll before heading towards a random tree away from Sasuke's path. The girl sat down and prepared herself to continue her elemental training.

There was still a long road to walk before confronting Itachi "once again", and Sakura knew those were just the first steps. Sasuke, who had been still running over a tree, was also aware of that fact.

Perhaps now that he chose to understand his brother instead of just killing him, his path became harder to walk.

Now, however, it no longer was a path he had to walk alone.

* * *

A/N:

Hey!

A fair bit long, huh? That's what my break from college did to me! Pity that it will be over soon but eh...

I recently got some news about a change in my work hours. My shift moved from 9:00-16:00 to 11:30-17:30 and that gives me more time to work both on my studies and in college. And that's without a salary change! (in terms. They no longer pay for our food, which is about 380 Reais per month or 19 per day.)

So, hopefully, nothing like last chapter's delay will happen again...

Anyways, regarding this chapter. Though I didn't exactly plan for it, the chapter's theme kinda became whether or not forcing (or just heavily incentivizing) people to grow works better than letting things flow naturally, at their own pace.

Kakashi and Kurenai have conflicting views, but both concede that the other's approach can work better at times, even if it can backfire partially like what you saw with this fic's Sakura... or heavily, like canon's Sasuke. There is no right answer to this, hence the title (also reflects a bit on how Naruto thinks he figured out the "enigmatic" Hinata). Even Kakashi's approach had some good on it, because Team 7 would have bonded naturally if it had not been for Orochimaru's intervention and later Itachi being a dumbass.

...I'm also aware that I said this chapter would likely finish when the big battle was about to begin, but not only this chapter became too big, but I also chose to not screw future me's life by making the entirety of chapter 13 action-based. There are better chances of me ending chapter 13 at the point I want to end it with this setup. But I am sure that it won't be a full extra month.

Again on that point, I might delay the next chapter due to increased length solely because of the plan I spoke of above. Keep an eye out on the total word count changes on my profile by the end of August, alright?

And, well, this chapter was pretty eventful. I'd like to hear what you guys thought about it, ok! See ya, and look forward to action when Chapter 13 arrives! Whenever that is...

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.1 (11/12/2016)

After noticing a small segment of the chapter was missing, thanks to _Kartikey_ , I went back to the part where Naruto "solves the puzzle" to place what should've been there to begin with and polish a couple parts.


	13. Chapter 13 - Shattered, part 1

Yo!

"Flare Blade, are they _still_ in Namek—I mean, Wave?"

Yup... sorry about the long time this arc took, guys. And especially sorry about this chapter's delay. My PC crashed while I was working on this during an autosave, and I lost quite a bit of content... which was triply bad because it was content done in the only weeks where college was not important enough compared to this story, so rewriting all of that took even more time.

Kinda lost my motivation to write for a few days thanks to that, and then I got sick on top of it... and finally, at the last minute, the new Phoenix Wright game came out and I barely could put it down. You guys were lucky the last time this happened (July, with Zero Escape Time Dilemma) I didn't have college...

Lastly, the very first of those issues ended up messing my schedule, throwing the bulk of the edition process into the weekdays... which slowed down the process considerably once I was finally done writing.

Still, I hope that you have been enjoying the arc so far. Especially the new content, which is the friendship building I've been focusing on.

Or "Social Linking", as I like to call it. Gotta hope Hinata doesn't try to fuse Star Arcana personas for a while and that Naruto doesn't need any Strength Arcana ones, cuz their link's reversed right now. Meanwhile, Sasuke got an exp boost when working with Lovers Arcana persona while Sakura got the same for Fool Arcana ones, haha. (Do any Persona fans out there think those arcana are unfitting/there are better choices?)

There was a mostly even split of plot-advancement and relationship building up to this point (It's been a while, but we have dealt with actual plot for the first three chapters of the arc, remember?), and this chapter will have little to none of the latter to compensate for the plot being mostly frozen during the last three chapters. But no more! (unless you count Inari's parts as relationship building...)

Indeed, this is the first part of this arc's finale, so we will soon be leaving the Land of Waves behind forever (for this book anyways)! Yay! Like the end of the prologue arc, this will be divided into two chapters... but like during the time Zabuza first appeared, those two chapters will have enough content to stand for three different chapters when put together. The big difference is that I won't post both at once.

* * *

Guest Review answers:

Areving: I really, really, REALLY want to give your review the response it deserves, but I don't want to make this chapter longer than it already is and annoy the other readers... so, for now, I'll just say that your review made me incredibly happy (something you accomplished with some consistency) and I _implore_ you to make an account so that I can give you an actual answer via PM. Seriously, please do it!

Guest that said something about Hinata tripping chapters ago: I'm dumb (sorry) and only really understood what you meant now. Hinata has a small tripping problem (I blame Masahiro Sakurai) but in those circumstances she was the least likely to actually trip over something, what with the mist giving everyone else such a hard time except the one gal that had special eyes.

BR!Guest that was freaking out: Lol. Sadly, BR here as well... glad you liked the fic, though!

Guest that was mad: Haha. I'm glad you liked it, but the reception has been pretty okay IMO. Could be better, yeah, but the series is over, so popularity is starting to decline I suppose. Especially on the NH side of things where it is already canon and stuff (doesn't help that, somehow, The Last has been well received despite how hugely flawed it is #hypocrisy).

* * *

Okay, grab something to eat (this one is BIG), and let's get started! Hope you guys enjoy it! (I, particularly, am not too fond of this chapter. But hopefully you all will disagree with me.)

* * *

 _Land of Waves arc_

Chapter 13: Shattered, part 1 (Current Version: 1.0.1)

* * *

A full week had gone by ever since Tazuna and his escorts had arrived in the Land of Waves...

The ninja had spent most of that time period training, given the circumstances around the assassination attempt that happened right on their first day in the country. Still, none of them felt quite prepared for what was to come.

Kurenai was doing her job as Tazuna's primary bodyguard well, but Zabuza's abilities made illusions useless, leaving the kunoichi to rely skills that she hadn't as much mastery or confidence in. The knowledge that she had only survived against the rogue nin's assault because of Kakashi, who wasn't guarding the bridge with her, only added to the woman's stress levels.

The Copy Ninja himself was still recovering from the toll of almost dying from chakra exhaustion, and though he had secretly spent the last few days of the week exercising his body, Kakashi knew he wasn't at 100% just yet. He honestly hadn't been at his best for quite a long time, given that he relaxed a fair bit on his training regimen after the Hokage made him quit the ANBU. However, with his team in danger, he knew he had to bring out his A-game the next time he and the rogue swordsman crossed blades.

The genin were completely out their league, and even though all of them progressed a fair bit with their respective training exercises, they knew that it was extremely far from "barely enough". Zabuza wouldn't play around with them, and likely neither would whatever underlings he would bring with him.

Shino, however, was satisfied with how he and his fellow genin were progressing. Unlike the others, he had accepted that there was little that would leave them fully prepared for the fights that were to come, and decided to make the most out of the training he could _actually_ do and base his opinions on that alone.

He understood that the other boys were getting frustrated with how long they were taking to master an exercise that Sakura and Hinata managed to complete in a single day, but he also understood how the three had larger reserves and unrefined control when compared to the girls and himself. Kiba and Sasuke were fairly good at fighting if they could use everything they had at disposal, so making sure they could keep the pressure on foes for longer with Passing Fangs and Great Fireballs was a good thing in his mind. The genin would certainly be relying on them, given that they were the strongest fighters among the six.

The much-needed taijutsu training Sasuke goaded Naruto into doing would also be helpful to all of them in the end, and if Kakashi's words were correct, Naruto's endless army of clones might just be a little more durable than before in addition to more skilled. None of those things would really help the three survive against Zabuza, but holding back the fake hunter-nin and whatever other underlings the rogue swordsman might have would be feasible. That, he knew, was a job that would fall to those three, since he and the girls would be unable to perform effectively in the mist.

On that topic, Shino knew that the elemental training he, Sakura and Hinata were doing would be futile. None of them would be mastering their element in time for the fight, even though all three had progressed a lot more than their jonin-sensei had expected. Still, while the three weren't advancing enough to be learning any ninjutsu, the constant sparring that Kurenai had them doing to conserve chakra had been extremely helpful to hone their taijutsu in the Aburame's opinion.

In the end, they were not at all ready for the trials that were to come. But, Shino would argue, they had done the best possible to prepare themselves. And even though none of his fellow genin agreed with him (not that he asked, or had been asked), they all were in a good mood despite knowing Zabuza soon would be fully healed from his wounds.

Well... mostly. Shino didn't mingle as much as his friends, but he observed. People forgot about him, but he never forgets anyone.

Though some people were closer to each other than before, such as Sakura with Sasuke or Kiba with Naruto, he saw that the relationship between the two girls of the group had been somewhat strained after the incident at the previous day's breakfast. Or, as the Inuzuka had put it, they weren't as buddy-buddy as before.

Much to the Aburame's vexing, Kiba seemed to know what exactly went on between Sakura and Hinata, but refused to share, arguing that they would get over it on their own. Of course, Kiba hadn't been the one that dealt with the awkwardness between the two for an entire day...

Luckily for Shino, they mostly got past that during their following day of training, but the same didn't apply to the more worrying case of Naruto and Hinata. Luckily, the two barely ever spent time around each other due to their conflicting schedules, but even during such times, they did their best to avoid each other. It didn't stop either from glancing at the other from time to time, but the few times Shino saw their gazes meeting, the end result was always the same: they broke eye contact immediately, and both seemed to feel guilty about something that was beyond him.

This was a subject Kiba seemed to have incomplete information on, and from the looks he saw the Inuzuka aiming at the Naruto once or twice, his teammate appeared to be debating whether or not to try and force the information out of the Uzumaki. Given that Naruto was one to loudly protest when things didn't go as he wished, Shino was sure that this different behavior the blond had been exhibiting meant Kiba would only make things worse if he tried to interfere. Luckily, said argument was enough to keep the dog-boy on his leash, but for how long Shino wasn't sure.

And from the civilian side of things, Shino could say he was surprised that Tazuna and Tsunami both weren't very outwardly worried as he had expected. His guess was that the two understood that they could do nothing else but trust that Teams 8 and 7 would be able to fulfill their mission, and perhaps in preparation for a worst-case scenario, father and daughter had spent as much time around each other as they could.

Inari, however, was an entirely different story.

If the boy's words during their first meeting (which had been, so far, the only time he had ever spoken to any of the ninja) were true, then Tsunami's son was absolutely certain that they would fail. What the boy hadn't actually mentioned was how that essentially was the same thing as his grandfather dying trying to defy Gatou, much like he had been forced to witness when his father had attempted the same, and given the boy's silence ever since, Shino had the impression that nobody besides himself made that connection upon hearing Kaiza's story.

Shino understood that the experience shattered the boy's faith, that witnessing such cruelty at such a young age could do irreparable damage to a child's psyche... but Inari seemed to be blaming the ninja for the mortal danger Tazuna was exposed to, from Shino's analysis. Of course, the reason behind the hateful glares he sent towards the Konoha teams when he thought nobody was looking was clear: had they declined Tazuna's true mission request, the old bridge builder wouldn't have kept trying to do his job to save the Land of Waves.

What Inari completely failed to realize was that without their assistance, the Demon Brothers would have ambushed a lone Tazuna on his way home and the old man would have died anyways. This ungratefulness was what bothered Shino, but he remained quiet, given that he knew Inari would contribute nothing to their mission and was, as such, an unnecessary concern...

Until what ended up being the last dinner prior to their fight with Zabuza came, that is.

Finally, after over seven days spent doing nothing but climbing trees, the three boys managed to reach the top after going all-out during the evening. None of them could walk straight afterwards, and the blond Uzumaki even needed Sasuke's help to support himself on the way back. The late night training had taken a toll on them, but not one of the boys kept their happiness hidden

The Uchiha just had a content smirk on his face, and the other two were noisily celebrating their success. Naruto was particularly loud, and his glee at finally reaching the treetops with nothing but chakra was more outwardly expressed than Kiba's. This made him the perfect target for Inari's covert glares, but it wasn't until dinner was over that thing began to escalate.

"In just a few more days, the bridge will finally be complete," the bridge builder began while his daughter started to gather everyone's dishes. Even though a few of his workers had given up due to fear, the Land of Fire's shores were already visible from the distance. "And I have you—all nine of you—to thank for this."

At Akamaru's happy bark from being remembered, Shino noted to himself that at least Tazuna wasn't like his grandson.

"Still, you all should remain vigilant," Tsunami said stoically as she went about taking everyone's used plates. "You said that the assassin would likely be taking a week to recover from his wounds... so he could show up at any moment, now."

"Heh, don't worry!" Naruto, who was slumped over the table uncouthly, smirked overconfidently. "Now that I finally got to the top of that stupid tree, I'll be patrolling the bridge starting tomorrow!" the boy spoke, reiterating what Kakashi and Kurenai had said when he and the others finally got home after training for longer than normal that day.

"You weren't the only one, you know..." Kiba muttered under his breath, something Shino only caught because the Inuzuka was right by his side. Though he and Sasuke both were somewhat annoyed from being ignored, neither could compare to Inari and his scowl, Shino noted. Not that Naruto could see any of them, given that his eyes were closed as he rested after eating so many bowls.

Meanwhile, Kakashi chuckled a bit. "Don't forget that I, too, will be at the bridge from now on."

Instead of looking assured by the jonin's comment, Tazuna's expression hardened.

"Look... I've been meaning to ask you two this," he shot a look at both Kakashi and Kurenai, "but I never found the moment to say it. Why did you two agree to continue the mission? Both of you had plenty of reasons to call it quits, but you actually let the brats decide instead of saying something right away."

That, Shino was now sure, was because there was no choice to be made. There were too many oddities in how both jonin behaved for them to not have known the mission's true nature, and from the look he saw Sasuke giving to both adults, Shino knew he wasn't the only one to have reached that conclusion.

"Those who stray from the path of justice have no courage, but under the wing of a strong leader, cowardice cannot survive."

Shino's eyes widened. _'That's—!'_

"That's a quote from the First Hokage, isn't it?" Sakura said before Shino could even open his mouth, leaving the Aburame's eye twitching beneath his sunglasses. And to think, he had thought it was time for him to move from the background and have the spotlight if only for a moment...

And then Shino once again noticed Inari. The boy's arms were trembling, undoubtedly from clenching his fist too strongly under the table, and even though his dark lenses made it hard to see, Shino was sure that the boy's eyes were moistening.

Despite being on the verge of tears, Inari still raised his head to glare at an oblivious Naruto, who had slumped down on the table like the no-mannered troublemaker Shino knew he was.

"But _why..._?"Inari muttered in a low tone, drawing the attention of a few people around him, including Naruto. They all looked to the boy just in time to see him giving up on holding back his tears.

"Huh? What was that?" the blond raised his head, staring at Inari curiously.

Had anyone else been as observant as he was, Shino told himself, no one would have been surprised when the younger boy slammed his hands on the table as he got up.

"All those stupid training exercises you wasted a week on are worthless! Climbing trees? Making blocks of dirt and filling bowls with water? Gatou has _an army_ of mercenaries, and you all almost got wiped out by just one guy!" Inari spat furiously, not caring at all about the tears rolling down his cheeks. "It doesn't matter how much you train or how much you keep saying cool phrases and acting like everything will be alright! It won't! Gatou will defeat and kill all of you! The strong always win, and the weak always lose. Don't you get it already!?"

Shino watched as some of his fellow genin, as well as Tazuna and Tsunami, were taken aback by the outburst. Truly, the mere idea of Gatou bringing his entire mercenary force to the bridge was frightening, but the magnate couldn't do that as long as Zabuza still lived. Breaking one's contract with a missing-nin when you were but a civilian was a bad idea, to say the least. Kakashi and Kurenai both only looked surprised by the boy's tantrum itself rather than the message, as both were confident that an army of non-ninja would do little against them.

Still, Naruto only closed his eyes again in annoyance, slumping on the table once again as he shrugged off Inari's words. "Ha, speak for yourself! With me around, that's not how things are going to end up."

This only enraged the younger boy further. "Why don't you shut up already!? You... just looking at you laughing and joking around like a clown makes me sick! It's an insult to all the pain we have gone through! You don't know anything about our country! You don't know anything about suffering and being treated like trash, you nosy idiot!"

A subtle gasp from Hinata brought Shino's eyes to her for a moment. She was staring at Naruto (which he knew he should have predicted already), and when he followed her line of sight, he saw that Inari's remarks had finally angered the Uzumaki.

"Look at you... crying and whining all the time like a sorry little victim!" Naruto's growl and feral gaze made Inari stop in his tracks, and Shino was forced to admit that the blond looked legitimately threatening. "You know what, _that_ is an insult to what he got through!" he pointed at the incomplete family portrait that hung behind him, and Inari recoiled. "So go on! Keep crying there for as long as you want, you spineless coward!"

"Naruto! You... that's going too far!" Sakura scolded him immediately, but her yell was ignored as Naruto shoved his fists inside his pockets and left to his room. The pinkette faltered as she watched him leaving, especially once Sasuke announced that he was going to take a bath and left as well. Given the Uchiha's past and the look of disgust that he shot at Inari, Shino was sure he shared Naruto's viewpoint, for once.

Inari couldn't handle the accusation and the glare. He broke down on the spot, sobbing loudly... and while his mother instantly moved to hug him and offer some comfort, the boy squeezed out of her grasp.

"I... I-I need some air," he said with a wavering voice between sobs. Too embarrassed and shaken to handle being around other people at the moment, Inari left the house.

"Inari..." Tsunami muttered, eyes glazing over as she held back tears of her own.

"I'm sorry about what happened," Kakashi said, looking at the woman and then at Tazuna.

With sorrow clear on his tired features, Tazuna shook his head. "Don't be... the only one that has to answer for what happened here is Gatou."

Still, Kakashi could let things end just like that. "If you don't mind, I'll talk with Inari. If he understands Naruto's point of view, I think it will give him something to think about."

"Get in the line," Kiba interjected, pointing with his thumb at the empty chair that was beside Shino.

"Uh, I think she beat you to it, sensei," Sakura added sheepishly, as both Kakashi and Kiba heard the sound of a door opening and closing softly.

Kakashi blinked once and looked at Kurenai, who shrugged at him. "Well," he said; the humor on his voice contrasting heavily with the seriousness he had exhibited prior, "I suppose I should be off before that line gets too big... I hate to be kept waiting."

Shino did not understand why Sakura and Kurenai were so angered by the comment.

* * *

The salt water from the ocean mixed in with Inari's tears as he sat on the edge of the wooden platform the house was built on. He watched the waves rolling through the surface, disturbing the perfectly white reflection of the crescent moon and the starry sky. The image and the soft sound of the water moving always helped to calm him, even though it wasn't working as well this time.

He barely had a moment of peace before he heard quiet footsteps resounding from the wooden surface behind him.

"Inari-kun... can I sit with you?" Hinata asked with an even, gentle tone. It didn't exactly reflect her inner state, but something inside her also refused to be held back by her shyness at that moment.

Inari wanted to not-kindly ask her to go away, but he didn't trust his voice enough. Hoping that the silence would make the Hyuuga take the hint, he didn't say anything.

Hinata understood what he meant, but chose to sit down beside him anyways. Inari didn't acknowledge her present right away, outside a sideways glance that was only enough to catch a glimpse of the girl's sandaled feet that now hovered above the ocean.

They spent a few moments quietly watching the sea, moments that Hinata spent steeling herself and trying to find the right words. She had followed Inari completely out of impulse, but despite her resolve, the right words slipped her mind.

Inari found the lack of conversation unnerving. "...What do you want?" the boy eventually asked, "If... if you want me to apologize, know that I won't," he spat shakily, still facing forward.

Thus, he didn't see Hinata shaking her head. "No... that's not why I came here. Perhaps it is not my place, but I just wanted you to understand from where Naruto-kun comes from."

Inari wanted to snort but didn't find in himself to do so. What could possibly be to understand about that happy-go-lucky clown?

"I know that his words hurt you... and I won't say that Naruto-kun meant well by them," the girl continued. "Even so, I think there's still something that you can learn from him."

This time, Inari didn't hold himself back. "Ha... from an idiot like him? I doubt it. He doesn't know anything."

"...Actually, Tazuna-san told us. About your father... we know."

The comment made Inari angry. Naruto knew, and still dared to say what he said to him? _'Asshole...'_

"But... you are not the only one that went through a past of suffering. He knows about that as well... more than any of us, perhaps, even though he never felt the pain of losing anyone."

Inari was just about to roll his eyes and maybe insult Hinata given her last words, but she continued before he could do anything.

"You would never figure it out just by looking at him, but... Naruto-kun grew up completely by himself. No parents, no family... and until this past week, no real friends either."

 _'He's... an orphan...!?'_ Shocked, Inari finally turned to face Hinata, and the sorrow on the girl's expression was clear to see... which meant she was likely speaking the truth.

The mere possibility that a goof like Naruto knew at least a little about what is to suffer completely baffled the boy. How could someone that had such a past smile and carefreely spout nonsense as much Naruto does on a daily basis? Inari couldn't understand.

"Wait, you mean to say that... he was completely alone?"

"...For the most part," the girl admitted, not wanting to lie despite knowing the argument became weaker for it. "There were a few people that brought light to his life, and back at the academy he did hang out with a few students sometimes, but... Naruto-kun spent most of his life alone, yes. For the most part, no one wanted even to be near him. The people we studied with... the villagers... other ninja... I don't understand why, but most of them hate him. Many treat him as if he was worth absolutely nothing or completely ignore him."

"But... but why?" Inari could see why people would avoid someone as obnoxious as Naruto but, he thought, hate was going a little too far, wasn't it?

"Like I said, I don't know," Hinata reiterated with a pained voiced. "But even despite all that, Naruto-kun found a dream to live for. He wants to become the Hokage, the leader of our village and the strongest ninja of the leaf. This way, people would respect him, pay attention to him... and love him. That's what he wants, and he never once stopped fighting for that dream."

 _'He... he just wants them to stop hating him...'_ Inari realized, for the first time feeling something other than anger or annoyance when thinking about Naruto.

"In the village," the bluenette continued "people called him a demon and refused to deal with him... on the academy, he was deemed a hopeless failure by everybody, one that would never amount to more than a genin if even that. That was his life."

Finally, the girl turned her head to face Inari, this time smiling. "Do you see, Inari-kun? Despite almost everything and everyone being against him... he never let go of his dream. No matter how many times he falls, he always gets back to his feet and keeps going forward. Unlike you... and unlike me, when the world became too harsh, he didn't stop and cry. He didn't give up—he refused to give up, ever. He knows what the word "suffering" mean... but he also knows what "perseverance" means as well. His headband is proof of that."

Though Hinata's pale lavender eyes held no ill will—she couldn't blame the boy for reacting the way he did—Inari couldn't find in himself to keep looking at her as shame bloomed inside him. _'That's why he was so angry at me... he didn't want me to give up.'_

Seeing that she was finally getting through the young boy, Hinata let herself smile a bit. "Even though he is just a kid, I think... I think he has a strength that few people will ever have in their lives. Just... l-like your father did."

This time, the words truly stung. Inari refused to admit it to himself... but deep down, the reason Naruto's attitude annoyed him so much was because it reminded the boy of his late father. They had the same defiant spirit... the same inner strength. It was painful just to look at him.

"Naruto-kun never had to deal with the pain of loss, since he never had anyone to begin with..." Hinata repeated, "but even then, I think he understands what you are going through better than anyone else among us. Sorrow, and hopelessness..."

The girl considered that perhaps Sasuke's situation was more similar, but the Uchiha was far too revenge-driven to relate as much. She, too, could be an example to a degree, but Hinata knew she ultimately wasn't the right example, in light of recent events.

The two lapsed into silence once again, and both went back to watching the ocean as Hinata let her words sink in.

"...Is that really true?" he couldn't help but ask. After all, how was he supposed to believe that someone as cheery and carefree as Naruto had led a life of suffering for so long? He _still_ couldn't. Inari knew the bluenette had no reason at all to lie to him, but he struggled to accept her words nonetheless.

"...It is." As much as Hinata wanted to deny it... to say that, no, Naruto had actually grown up with a loving family and surrounded by friends and people that loved him... it simply wasn't true. It wasn't the harsh reality Naruto had gone through.

"But I don't understand..."

"What is it, Inari-kun?"

The boy raised his head to look at her. "If that's the case then... then how can he keep smiling like that? How can he act like he doesn't have a care in the world?"

Hinata gulped. That, was a question she had asked herself many times. Just from where did Naruto's strength come from, when he grew up in an environment of hate rather than love? She had no answer to Inari.

"If I had to guess..."

The two kids were startled as a new voice joined them. Whipping their heads around instantly, they both saw Kakashi as he approached them as nonchalantly as always. The jonin had sensed that the conversation would come to a halt, and decided to intervene.

"Life made Naruto the tough kid that he is now, but it wasn't always like that. As a younger child, I suspect he too faltered and cried when nobody was there to see it."

These "suspicions" were nothing but the truth that Kakashi had personally witnessed. As one of the few ANBU that had been assigned to Naruto's protection detail after an assassination attempt months after the boy's birth, he had seen the boy crying himself to sleep many times when he was smaller... younger than Inari, even.

"Those words he told you during dinner," the jonin continued, "they were harsh, but I suspect that he kept telling them to himself over and over again while he was close to breaking down. They are what kept him going."

Hinata lowered her gaze to the sea. She could picture it perfectly in her mind: the brave boy that had rescued her from bullies on that snowy day, running home so that he could cry while nobody was there to judge him. Crying from the pain his body—now swollen and bruised—had gone through... from his wounded pride after being humiliated yet again... and even from the loss the beautiful red scarf—likely a precious present of some sort—that had been ruined and no longer could protect him from the cold.

 _"Look at you... crying and whining all the time like a sorry little victim!"_

"And one day, he decided to stop crying and do something about it. To prove to everyone else that they were wrong about him. That's why he throws himself at training and gives it his all," Kakashi continued. "You two saw how Naruto skipped dinner these past two days to keep climbing trees on his own at night, didn't you?"

The jonin, having said his piece, went quiet and watched as the two kids processed his words.

Hinata knew that deep down Naruto suffered even if he kept it hidden, but as much as it was obvious in hindsight, she had never truly considered that he had been teetering on the edge of the abyss so many times already. It made the girl feel even guiltier for never being able to muster the courage to befriend the blond.

Inari, for his part, now felt incredibly guilty and worn down from both his emotional outburst at dinner and what he now knew about Naruto's life. He didn't have the energy to keep thinking about those things, however.

"I... I'm going back home," the boy muttered as he got up. "...Thank you for telling me this," he said before entering the house again, intending to sleep and reflect on everything he had heard on the following day.

Hinata and Kakashi watched Inari until he was gone.

"We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow," the silver-haired man cautioned. "You should go to sleep as well."

"R-right," the girl nodded, getting up soon afterwards and offering the older man a bow. "Good night, Kakashi-sensei."

The man nodded at the gesture knowing it was more of a 'thank you" than a show of respect.

Though the girl walked towards the house's door, Kakashi remained still until she was just about to enter.

"But I must say, I'm surprised you knew this much about Naruto," the jonin commented, making Hinata freeze, her back turned to him. "You actually have a fairly good understanding of who he actually is."

Kakashi had seen the signs of a silly childhood crush before, but only now he saw that there was more to it than that. "I don't know what drove a wrench between you two... but Naruto could really use a friend like you in his life."

"..."

Torn, Hinata walked away without being able to give Kakashi a response.

* * *

 _"Did you listen, COWARD of the Hidden Mist?! I said to stop licking your wounds and—!"_

Taking great pleasure in the act, Zabuza used his boot to crush the transceiver that allowed him to talk to Gatou, cutting off the magnate's rant. He had wanted to put more strength into his stomp, but he had to control himself lest he put a hole into the simple wooden boat he and his favorite "tools" were riding.

The destination? The bridge his target was building, more specifically the unfinished end of the structure.

While Haku was in his usual mission clothes, Haru ditched her kimono for a getup similar to her brother, even including a charka-enhanced mask stolen from the corpse of a hunter-nin. The only thing that had truly set the two apart was that Haku still had his hair bound in a tight bun, whereas his sister chose to let her hair flow freely down her shoulders like she always did.

"With that annoyance dealt with," the swordsman began, "do you two have any questions about our mission?

Haku, who had been busy paddling, raised his hand for a brief second to get Zabuza's attention before resuming his work. "Forgive me Zabuza-sama, but I don't understand why you want to incapacitate the Genjutsu Mistress and fight the stronger opponent, the Copy Ninja. Wouldn't it be safer to do it the other way around?"

"Undoubtedly, it would make our mission easier since Kurenai hasn't the means to fight me without help," the jonin agreed, "but you remember our endgame, don't you?"

"...Yagura," the boy whispered darkly, making his sister frown from behind her mask.

"Kakashi is much weaker than the Mizukage is going to be," Zabuza explained. "I want to test my skills against him in a real fight to see how far I have come ever since we escaped the Bloody Mist." After all, Zabuza reasoned with himself that if he were to be killed by Kakashi, all that meant was that he would have died to the Sanbi Jinchuuriki later anyways. This time Zabuza was prepared, even going as far as to wear a chainmail armor over a simple dark blue sleeveless shirt.

While it excited Zabuza, the thought of the duel for the Mizukage's hat still made Haru feel uneasy. Still, she ignored the feeling and focused on her own question. "Zabuza-sama, I'm afraid I don't see the logic in sparing the genin. I mean, I know they are a waste of effort to kill, but you said you want them alive..."

"I can make a profit out of those children on the black market," he answered, the logic of it being easy to see when his mind wasn't clouded by a genjutsu. "After the time I spent recovering, Gatou isn't going to accept an increase in payment just because of the two enemy jonin, and this will help me hire stronger mercenaries for our forces."

Having recognized the Uchiha clan's symbol on the back of Sasuke's shirt, Zabuza knew the boy's eyes could have the now-rare dojutsu of his clan, though he would need to give the boy some incentive to make it awaken if he didn't have his special eyes yet. He had a contact from his days as a simple jonin that would be delighted to study an Aburame's still living body, and he also knew that the Inuzuka clan's specially trained ninken could be sold for much money, especially with its trainer to keep the dog in a leash, as they tended to become uncontrollable beasts once their owners died.

The girls were both young and seemingly healthy, perfect to be sold to a prostitution house for a high price. Hinata was one he also could make extra profit from, knowing that the Byakugan could be sold to Kumo for an insane price.

"But one of them, no," the man growled remembering the defiant blond that had dared to stand up to him. "One of them I will kill personally."

Haru simply nodded in response, and the three became quiet as Haku continued to direct the boat towards the end of the bridge. The girl had no problems in killing those kids, including the ones that had befriended her. It would be a pity if it came to that, but at least she knew the girl that had helped her heal Zabuza's wounds would still be alive... even though living would be a fate worse than death in that case.

That fact hadn't sunk in for Haru just yet, however.

Eventually, Haku stopped paddling, and Zabuza immediately went to work. Focusing on the chakra present into the ocean waters, Zabuza manipulated it easily thanks to his strong affinity for the Water element, molding the liquid into two simple elemental clones.

As the two water constructs began to climb up the bridge, Zabuza weaved a few hand signs and slowly enveloped a large portion of the bridge's end into his special mist, negating any illusions or bugs the Konoha ninja might have left behind as traps or scouts.

Looking towards the sun while it was still visible, Zabuza could see that if Haku's intel was true, the target would still not be on the bridge yet.

Haru didn't have that knowledge, though. "What do we do now, Zabuza-sama?"

"Now?" he spared the masked girl a glance. "Now we wait..."

* * *

"Now?" Gatou growled to one of his bodyguards. "Now we move!"

The magnate rose from his comfy sofa, and after calling a servant and ordering her to clean up the mess he made by throwing his transceiver at the wall in a fit of rage, he addressed the two swordsmen under his command again. "Gather the men outside the ship."

Though Gatou had an army of mercenaries, among them only his actual bodyguards ever got to set foot inside the luxurious ship the businessman used as his home and base of operations during his stays on the Land of Waves. "I'll give them their orders myself. With that done, I want you two to find that peasant's house and bring me a hostage. Now!"

Knowing fully well that the peasant in question was Tazuna, the two men nodded to their enraged employer and set off in a hurry.

"I didn't want to do this, bridge builder... but you left me no choice!" the magnate said to himself, still furious. "Just like that stupid fisherman... you will know what happens to those who defy Gatou Corporation!"

* * *

Hidden behind the black cloth of his mask, Kakashi sighed. "Looks like my hunch was spot on," he muttered. The mist that was covering the bridge's end was visible even from inside the town's main street, which lead to the construction site.

"Dammit," Tazuna cursed. "Some of my men should be there already... looks like you were right after all. You and bug boy both," he said, remembering that Shino had alerted them of the moment he had lost the connection between himself and the kikaichu that were scouting the far end of the bridge.

"Some of my bugs managed to escape the mist," the Aburame stated, turning to his sensei to report. "They should be coming back with whatever intel they were able to gather soon."

Kurenai nodded and then looked at her remaining students.

"Yup. That's the stink of that guy's sword alright," Kiba said grimly. "I can pick up a few new smells but I'm not sure if they are enemies or the workers... it's the first time I've been here after all."

"I-I'm sorry, Tazuna-san... I can't see far enough yet," Hinata apologize, lowering her head. Her range had increased a few meters these past few days, but it wasn't enough to reach the bridge even with when straining her eyes.

"Do not worry," Shino stated, holding a hand so that a small amount of approaching kikaichu could land on it. "...According to my beetles, the workers were attacked but none of them are actually wounded. There are small injuries ranging from—"

"That's nice and all," Sakura cut him off as she drew a kunai, "but we have bigger problems than that."

"The girl is right," Tazuna agreed, facing Kakashi and Kurenai. "You two sure that I should be going in there with you?"

"I know you are afraid of being near what will soon be a battlefield," Kurenai offered sympathetically, "but we cannot risk you being ambushed elsewhere while we deal with Zabuza. You will be safer this way, even if it doesn't look like it."

"Are we going or not?" Sasuke asked impatiently, twirling around a kunai in anticipation of the coming struggle. He made sure to check on his only present teammate's condition, and was pleased to see that she didn't seem to be consumed by fear... at least not yet. _'One less thing to worry about.'_

"I suppose keeping them waiting like this wouldn't be polite," Kakashi responded, ignoring the burning glares his two students aimed at him afterwards.

"Form up around Tazuna as we discussed," Kurenai commanded, and wordlessly, the genin moved to their positions while the jonin did the same.

Kiba stood in front of the bridge builder, having been given the position due to his good combat abilities and because his scouting abilities were the strongest inside the mist. His ninken was on the ground next to him, transformed into his master's likeness after a brief jutsu. Making up the rearguard were Hinata and Sasuke, the only other scout of the team and the strongest genin of the group respectively. Completing the star-shaped formation from the sides were Shino and Sakura, with the Aburame being between his two teammates.

Of course, the Inuzuka and his partner weren't the actual vanguard. That job fell to Kurenai and Kakashi, who were walking ahead of the party. Both had already prepared the techniques they would be relying on during the coming fight—Kurenai's fists were already encased in stone, and though it remained closed, the eye that held the man's Sharingan wasn't covered by his headband.

"Now," Kakashi promised, "It's time to end this."

As they marched towards the bridge, Hinata couldn't help being glad that Naruto was supposedly still inside Tazuna's home, remembering how Zabuza had almost killed him during their first encounter.

 _'I know that you wanted to be here fighting, helping... I can't say the same for the rest of us, but at least I know that you will still be safe.'_ she thought, more with dread than relief, following the group into what could be their deaths. A more selfish side of the girl still wished for the Uzumaki's presence, however.

Even though there was now a wall between them, and even though he was probably too tired to contribute significantly, she wanted to feel the light that followed Naruto whenever he went. That aura of hope and confidence that he displayed... even if he were to never address her again, just seeing him being so sure of himself made Hinata feel similarly, even if just a little.

The girl then shook her head.

 _'Stupid! Now it's not the time to be thinking about those things!'_

"Are you... alright?" Hinata heard Sasuke ask with some hesitance; practically whispering as to not draw anyone's attention.

"Ah, n-no. I mean, yes! I'm fine," she answered back messily, cheeks reddening from being caught daydreaming during a serious mission. The Uchiha looked unsure, having seen the girl shaking her head seemingly for no reason, but left the issue alone with but a raised eyebrow.

Hinata sighed once the boy's black orbs were no longer trained on her and tried to prepare herself mentally for the coming trials _._

* * *

"Dammit! I hope I'm not too late..." Naruto cursed as he flew through the forest, jumping from branch to branch towards his destination. While Tazuna and the other ninja had taken the road through the town to reach the bridge, Naruto didn't have to worry about an untrained civilian and chose to take a shortcut through the woods that surrounded the area.

His whole expanded team had left without waking him up, supposedly because they believed he would be too tired to help out. Naruto scoffed at the thought when Tsunami had informed him of everything, thinking they were silly and not refusing to dwell on the possibility that they just didn't want him to get in their way.

He, however, was heading the opposite direction and in quite the hurry. It wasn't because he had left as soon as he could and now his stomach was whining due to the lack of food (even though he planned to solve that problem once he got back), but because of what he had just found a couple minutes prior: the carcass of a boar, slashed on multiple areas with singular, deep strokes of what was undoubtedly some sort of sword given the wound's characteristics. No animal is capable of leaving such deep X-shaped bite marks behind.

The destruction around the area gave weight to that theory. Multiple trees and branches were ravaged in a similar manner to the poor boar, and worse of all... it all led directly to Tazuna's house.

An assassin, most likely. Possibly a kidnapper. Maaaaybe a drunk bandit. A bad guy for sure.

The only thing that kept Naruto from fully panicking was that he knew he had a chance to catch up to the supposed villain, but it did little good to the boy's mind once he followed the trail of destruction to its end.

The house barely came into sight when a scream resounded through the clearing. Tsunami's, Naruto realized with dread. The boy's first instinct was to hurry and enter the house, but he stopped himself as memories of Kakashi berating him for this kind of behavior when he fought against Shino.

 _"You are too predictable and rush into danger without thinking. A ninja needs to work as subtly as they can, using distractions to pull of their jutsu safely... otherwise, you will just fall for traps and become a burden,"_ the older ninja had advised, taking the time to rub in the fact that Naruto had easily fallen to two traps in a row during Team 7's bell test. Naruto knew his words were the truth, because when Shino had started to throw projectiles to stop him from actually creating more clones while setting up an ambush in the forest was when he had lost the fight.

The Aburame had also later commented that he could have ended their duel faster by taking a risk, but decided to hang back and gather information before acting. _"Forming the optimal strategy before acting was key to my victory,"_ Naruto distinctively remembered overhearing Shino's comment to Kiba.

Using those two pieces of advice, Naruto held himself back from breaking into the house via the kitchen's window and just stood below it, listening. He didn't dare to peek inside, however.

"Please, he is just a kid!" Tsunami begged, making Naruto curse under his breath. Inari had become involved somehow, if the boy's barely audible sobbing wasn't evidence enough. Part of Naruto was now feeling guilty for screaming at him during the previous day's dinner, now.

"I... I will do anything," the woman continued, and Naruto kept listening as the two males eventually agreed after some deliberation. Naruto didn't understand why the offer was good enough to keep them from killing Inari, but he was sure glad that the boy wouldn't be a factor now. The fact that he found out there were two enemies instead of one was good as well—spying from the window paid off, in the end.

As the pair of mercenaries began to tie up their hostage, Naruto took the chance to sit on the platform's floor to think.

 _'Alright. I can ambush them cuz they don't know I'm here, but they have Tsunami-san as a hostage. I need to take them by surprise as fast as I can or else they might threaten her or find me out... I only have one chance to make this work!'_

The boy facepalmed, and created a trio of clones. Two slowly dropped from the platform and swam underneath the wooden walkway that connected the house and the mainland, while the remaining one headed to the woods so he could grab a something solid for him to substitute with.

 _'Idiot,'_ he chastised himself for such an obvious oversight. Now, with more leeway for error, he thought a little more about how to engage his foes. _'Anyways, these guys probably have swords... I know that we ninja have stronger bodies than civilians because of how much chakra we have but... I don't know if these guys are like that.'_ Naruto remembered a story about how the samurai of the Land of Iron did not use ninjutsu but still were able to enhance their swordplay with chakra. _'I can't go in with kunai or taijutsu without being sure I can overpower them so... I need to distract them with projectiles,'_ he decided.

His plan was very simple: the walkway was narrow, only wide enough for three people to pass with comfort. His clones would try to trip the thugs to make them fall into the ocean, while the original Naruto would try to save Tsunami in case she fell with them. The clone with the substitution log was his backup, in case something went wrong.

As the later clone approached with a small log in his arms, both of them went to hide in a nearby bush to wait for the kidnappers to spring up his trap.

The two men soon left the house, both holding up a tied-up Tsunami.

"We need to get to the bridge soon before Gatou and the others arrive," one commented. "Good thing you knew how to dispel genjutsu, or else we'd take days to get out of that maze."

"Yeah... the fat bastard will throw a fit if we are late," the other agreed, and Naruto shared a shocked glance with his clone. The situation had just gotten a lot worse.

Just as the men were about to cross above the submerged clones, a voice stopped them in their tracks.

"I... I won't let you take my mom from me!"

The declaration was shaky and fearful, but the voice's owner was unmistakable.

 _'Inari!?'_

"Inari!?" Tsunami echoed Naruto's thoughts when Gatou's men turned around with her.

"Oh," one of them, the bare-chested one, sneered. "Looks like someone wants to play," he smiled wickedly.

The other one, who wore a hoodie and a baggy jacket, also seemed amused. "What do you plan to do with that little knife, kid? Make us a sandwich?" he provoked.

"Inari, stop! Don't do this!" The boy's mother pleaded, desperation lacing her voice as her only child was in danger and she could do nothing to protect him. "Please! _Run!_ "

"N...no. No! I won't run!" Inari glared at the two men as best as he could, and even if he had an intimidating face in the first place, the tears running down his cheeks would have ruined the effect—either that or the way he was trembling.

"This brat is kinda stupid, eh?" one of the swordsmen commented, and proceeded to knock out Tsunami with a strike to the back of her head when she started to struggle in a foolish attempt to save her child.

"I... Inari..." she muttered pitifully, losing consciousness as she fell.

Naruto and his clones watched/heard the interaction while doing their best to hold themselves back for the moment. It was silly and dangerous to do so, but they felt that Inari needed to have a moment to shine by himself, even if Naruto knew he would need to step in and save the boy soon afterwards.

He needed to soar with his own wings and learn to fly, instead of being caught before he could even jump.

And it was while still shaking violently and crying openly that the young boy made took the plunge.

"I... I-I won't let you hurt her!"

The two mercenaries burst out laughing, though the bare-chested one recovered faster. "Then show us what you can do, hero!" he mocked the boy, releasing his katana from its sheath in unison with his partner.

With the closest thing to a war cry that he could manage, Inari clutched the kitchen knife tightly and dashed recklessly towards the two men.

 _'Welp,'_ Naruto smirked. _'That's my cue!'_

Getting up from the bushes, he whispered a command to his clone and chakra jumped away. While in midair, he made a few hand signs to create a thin cord of chakra that connected him to the small log his copy had acquired, mentally chastising himself for not having done it sooner.

With perfect timing, Naruto landed right between Inari and the pair of thugs, grabbing the boy a mere second before the men's blades ran him through. Instead of meat and bones, just as Naruto planned, the swords only cut wood.

"Huh? A log!?"

"What the hell!?" the swordsmen cursed in confusion.

Naruto could only imagine their expressions and burst out laughing from the mental image, together with his clone. "Looking for something?"

"...Naruto!?" Inari gasped, only now realizing he was not only still alive and behind the mercenaries, but on Naruto's shoulder. "What are you doing here?"

"Saving you, duh!" the blond said playfully as he placed Inari on the ground.

His clone, who had been busy dragging Tsunami to a safer place while the kidnappers were distracted, readily agreed with his boss. "Yup, and at the last second for extra heroism, too!"

"Ah, what have we here," the bare-chested swordsman sneered. "Two of the ninja brats that are protecting Tazuna."

"They are twins...?" his hooded partner muttered in confusion, and Inari caught himself before contradicting the man and giving Naruto's trick away.

"It doesn't matter!" the other shouted, readying his blade. "Let's kill them!"

Naruto smirked, and made a gesture with his hand, shuriken hidden in the other. "Come on, you punks! Let's get this show started!"

* * *

A few minutes later...

"Well, that was disappointing," Naruto huffed as he watched two completely soaked Shadow Clones as they tied up and gagged the two similarly drenched swordsmen . It had cost him the last pieces of adhesive tape on his kunai pouch (which also held a few smaller tools from his old prankmaster days, as he liked to call them), but Naruto didn't mind the loss. He did want to keep the rope they used on Tsunami, but the sheer irony of bounding them with it made the boy give up on keeping it.

"Yeah... they were kinda pathetic, weren't they?" Inari commented. He had been expecting an epic showdown between a trained ninja and two experienced mercenaries but... it turned out that the men didn't know how to swim, so the confrontation ended terribly fast after the clones Naruto had positioned below the platform tripped them up and dragged them to the ocean, right after the original distracted them with projectiles.

"Meh, not like I'm not strong enough to beat the crap out of them anyways," Naruto shrugged lazily, as if the thought of going against two sword-users in such a tight walkway didn't bother him. "Anyways, great job out there!" he exclaimed, patting Inari on the head. He had been expecting that this would cause the younger boy to smile, but it had the opposite effect.

"How... how can you say that? I didn't do anything. I _couldn't_ do anything," Inari sighed, his gaze falling to the floor. The comment caught Naruto off-guard... and oddly enough he found himself reminded of Hinata as he watched the boy, and it left Naruto with mixed feelings.

He pushed the thought away as Inari continued. "You were the one who did the cool stuff that kinda made you look like a ninja—ow!"

Inari looked up, frowned as he held his nose. "What was that for?!" he demanded, referring to how Naruto flicked his nose, partially to stop Inari's self-depreciating train of thought, but...

"What do you mean "kinda"!? I'm a ninja through and through!" the Uzumaki exclaimed with a scowl. "And a super awesome one, at that. I mean, look at me. Can't you see how ninja-like I am?" he asked, pointing proudly at his headband.

Inari ignored it and gazed flatly at the blond. "I just see a whole lot of really bright orange. That's kinda the problem."

"You know, I almost prefer you being a jerk over all this sass." Naruto's eyes narrowed further as he looked away from the boy. "I honestly don't know what you and your grandpa have against orange. Orange is awesome."

Naruto thought he heard Inari mutter something like "that wasn't the point" but chose to move on to more important things. "So, to actually answer what you asked... you distracted them for me, and thanks to that I could rescue your mom without a hitch!" He then offered the boy a thumbs-up. "That was super important for my plan, you know? Like I said, great job!"

The words of encouragement went by practically unheard this time, however.

"That's right! Mom!" Kicking himself for having almost forgotten about her, Inari hurried to check on his mom. Coming closer, he knelt beside Tsunami and began to shake her. "Mom, wake up! Mom!"

"Hey, wait up!" Naruto grabbed the boy roughly by the shoulder, forcing him away from Tsunami. "Look," he pointed at the woman's chest, which was rising and falling normally. "She is still breathing; she should end up alright, okay? So don't go shaking her like that!"

Once Inari seemed calmer, Naruto let him go. The younger boy crawled up to his mom while Naruto watched uneasily, not knowing what to do. It got a little worse when Inari started to cry as the fact that he almost got killed and almost lost his mother started to sink in.

"She will be fine, right?" the smaller boy sobbed.

"Of course!" Naruto put on his best smile and practically shoved another thumbs up on Inari's face. "Everything will be alright, believe it!"

The younger boy smiled timidly, but it fell as he dried his tears with the back of his hand, only for more to take their place. "D-dammit..."

The curse word surprised Naruto. "Hey... what's up?"

"I-I'm crying again... even, even though I promised myself I wouldn't. Now you're going to yell at me again, aren't you?" Inari asked, rhetorically, from his point of view.

Contrary to his expectations, Naruto ended up ruffling his hair instead.

"Why would I do that?" the blond asked with a smile. "You're crying cuz your mom is fine. It's alright to cry when you are happy, you know?"

The younger boy let out a confused whimper, and Naruto retracted his hand partially to turn away from the boy. "And talking about that... I guess I should apologize for yesterday."

"What?!"

Idly, the blond scratched his head. "I said you were a coward... but today you proved me wrong, kiddo! It takes real courage to do what you did! Your old man would have been proud of you!"

Though his face was still wet, Inari broke out a wide grin that mirrored Naruto's. "Thanks!"

It was an expression that up to that moment Naruto had only seen in the ripped portrait in the kitchen, and he didn't have the heart to ruin it by taking a jab at Inari's practically suicidal recklessness. _'I mean, it turned alright in the end and it's not like he will be fighting people again anytime soon, so...'_

"You know, it was all because of you!"

"Huh...?" Now it was Naruto who became surprised at Inari's words.

"When those two started threatening mom, I started to cry. I knew I couldn't do anything to help her, that I was too weak... but then I remembered what you said to me!"

 _"Look at you... crying and whining all the time like a sorry little victim!"_

 _"You spineless coward!"_

"Seriously?" Naruto muttered in disbelief, to which Inari nodded.

"Yeah... and what your sensei and that blue-haired girl told me about your past too. It put a lot of things in perspective." Inari shifted uneasily as Naruto became legitimately shocked at what he heard. "I thought that if you could do it, I could do it too. And also—"

Inari proceeded to mention how Kaiza's words had also inspired him to take a step forward, but Naruto didn't listen, his mind elsewhere. That Kakashi knew a thing or three about his past wasn't terribly surprising; the Hokage probably gave the Copy Ninja a detailed file on his history before forcing him to be their teacher, he theorized.

But Hinata? That was a completely different case.

 _'We never even spoke to each other all those years at the academy. Just... just what the hell does she know about me that would change Inari's mind? About my past...? What is her deal!?'_

"—so, I hope you can forgive me for what I said too..." Naruto caught the end of Inari's apology and once again purged Hinata from his mind to focus on the matter at hand.

"Hey, no worries! We're cool," he assured the younger boy, beaming encouragingly.

The two shared a smile for a couple seconds until Inari spoke again. "So, what do we do now?"

"Crap!" Naruto cursed, panicking slightly as he remembered the how grave the situation was. "Bring your mom to a safe place, okay? I gotta go to the bridge!"

The orange-clad boy dashed off, only to whirl around seconds later. "You will be fine on your own, right?

"I will, believe it!" Inari declared with a wide smile and a thumbs up, making Naruto feel giddy on the inside. It was that same feeling of pride he had felt after he befriended Konohamaru, the Hokage's unruly grandson. Or rather, after he had gained a "follower", so to speak.

One day, though... one day it would be the entire village of Konoha that would be there, recognizing his strength and ideals. But for now, he thought with a smile, he could settle for just a few brats.

"Alright, I'm going!" Naruto chakra jumped away, feeling his reserves replenish as his clones dispelled.

 _'Time for a heroic entrance! ... Oh.'_

His grin fell as the memories of a dispelled clone entered his mind. Memories of a clone that all but forced Naruto to backtrack to Tazuna's kitchen, where the clone had ended its own existence.

After all, it would be rude to let all the effort the bunshin had put into that delicious cereal bowl to waste, especially since the poor copy had done its best to resist eating it all himself.

"I just hope I won't be too late to the party..."

* * *

Unbeknownst to Naruto, the "party" was just getting started.

"So, finally gathered the courage to show your face?" Zabuza's taunt came from within the mist, a hint of annoyance from being kept waiting. He had tossed the other bridge workers outside the area covered by the mist so that they wouldn't be in the way, but the Konoha ninja still took the time to move the men away to a safer place.

It was only when they were done with that task that Kakashi ordered his team enter the foggier end of the bridge, and even though the situation was serious enough to warrant him to use his Sharingan, the man still had a carefree smile behind his mask. "Sorry. I got lost on the road of life."

"Not the time, Kakashi," Kurenai hissed from his right, while Sasuke shook his head in disappointment and Sakura rolled her eyes. None of them were surprised that somehow even Kakashi's enemies became prey of his chronic lateness, even if well justified for once.

"I see that you brought your brats and the bridge builder with you," Zabuza commented as he approached the group. As he did so, he manipulated the mist to hide a couple of key tools, while keeping the mist between himself and the enemies only thick enough to negate Kurenai's Yin Release techniques and hopefully hinder Kakashi's. "I wonder if that was a smart plan..."

"And you brought your little helper as well," the Genjutsu Mistress noted, eyeing the masked Haku warily as he walked alongside his master.

"Ah yes, Haku told me how all of you were tricked by his farce. It was quite amusing, to see the fabled Sharingan and an illusion specialist fall for such a parlor trick," the swordsman sneered. "Besides, I suspected you'd bring those kids along. While we adults talk business, they can have someone to play with. But before that..."

The group started as almost two dozen of Zabuzas jumped from the bridge's sides, surrounding the genin and Tazuna.

"Shit!" Kiba cursed reflexively, recognizing the smell of the enemy. "These are water clones!"

"Let's see if you two did anything to help them become less pathetic than the last time we met," Zabuza finished as his clones began to advance on the genin. The two jonin-sensei were aware of the interlopers that appeared between themselves and their students, but turning to help them would leave them vulnerable to Zabuza.

That didn't stop Kurenai from giving them a little hint. "Water clones are only around 10% as strong as the original! You can handle them!"

This helped most of the genin to feel more confident, but since she was the only one fully aware of the number of enemies, Hinata didn't feel very relieved. _'They might be weaker, but the numeric advantage is significant...'_ she thought to herself, frowning as her Byakugan's impaired vision still let her view enough to catch all the clones.

She didn't have the time to think anything else as a clone came upon her, with another not too far behind.

The water construct tried to use its huge blade to decapitate Hinata, who ducked under the slash and closed the distance between them just in time to land a palm thrust on "Zabuza's" chest and inject chakra into him. This made the clone destabilize, leaving only a puddle on the floor where it once stood.

 _'He... wasn't fast,'_ she realized with some surprise. Despite Kurenai's warning, it was hard to make her brain believe these men were weak copies of the demon that had ambushed them a week prior. _'I think I can do this!'_

The second clone was a bit smarter than its companion, aiming its wide swing for the girl's mid-section to limit her options in dodging. Hinata hopped backwards, just short of barreling into Tazuna, before rushing at her foe with a bundle of shuriken in hand.

The steel stars flew towards the clone's head, only to bounce harmlessly off the fake Kubikiribocho when he used the flat of the blade to protect himself. The weapon had been solid enough to withstand the attack, but the collision upset the chakra within and made the sword splash on the clone's face.

The slight distraction was just enough for Hinata to close the gap between and end their fight with another Gentle Fist strike. Her vision caught a trio of clones approaching her from all sides, but a shadow blitzed through them, ending their existence before Hinata could even realize what was going on.

"Hey! Sasuke, stop stealing our kills!" she heard Kiba complaining, giving Hinata the answers she sought.

"Idiot, this isn't a game!" Sakura scolded the Inuzuka in return, bringing Hinata's focus back to her friends. Much to her relief, there were no enemies in sight and none of them were hurt. Sakura and Kiba both looked upset with their situation for different reasons, and though Shino still held his stoicism, what caught Hinata off-guard was how Sasuke seemed to be enjoying himself.

The raven was wet, the "blood" of his enemies staining his entire upper body while a pleased smirk rested on his face as he examined his wet kunai. _'I'm getting stronger,'_ he thought with awe, gripping the weapon tightly.

"Ah, the Uchiha has gotten even faster..." Zabuza commented aloud, clearly interested. "The other brats didn't do too badly either," he now said in a much lower tone, meant only for Haku's ears.

"Indeed," the boy nodded, only now realizing why his master had attacked the children despite his earlier orders.

"Kakashi, Kurenai," Zabuza began, "why don't we make things a little more interesting?"

"What do you have in mind?" Kurenai all but hissed, making the swordsman chuckle to himself.

"A duel. Your star genin versus my strongest tool, Haku. If your kid wins, I'll let all of the genin go free, but if he loses..."

"And makes you think we will trust your word?" Kakashi inquired, noticing through his enhanced vision how Haku held a thin, rapier-sized weapon in his hand. Someone with normal eyesight might have missed it, but Kakashi's Sharingan easily pinpointed the bright glow of chakra. Still, the color of said glow mystified the jonin. _'I've never seen chakra glowing white before... what could this mean?'_

"I know how you Leaf folk love going about the bonds between teammates, friendship, love, and all that teeth-rotting silliness that makes me want to vomit," Zabuza frowned. "As long as those brats are in the way, I can't get a proper rematch." Of course, that was a lie. The genin would be hunted down after their teachers fell if they escaped, but...

"I accept," Sasuke announced, confidently leaving his comrades behind as he approached the frontline.

Silently, Haku used the Body Flicker Jutsu to close the distance between then, reappearing in a gust of leaves a dozen meters away. _'Good, he is still near the water,'_ the Yuki observed.

"Sasuke, no!" Kakashi moved to intercept the masked ninja, but a few words laced with killing intent stopped him.

"Try to protect your student and the bridge builder dies." A heterochromatic glare was the only answer Kakashi had for Zabuza, as Tazuna and the other genin began to feel even more fear than before. Kakashi, himself, had a bad feeling about the situation.

"This goes for you as well, Kurenai," Zabuza addressed the owner of the pair of furious red eyes that were trying to burn a hole through him and the mist, as he watched his pupil's reappearance. "Unless you are in that much of a hurry to die like the walking target you are," he laughed at the woman, who internally was cursing the swordsman and his mist quite eloquently.

Once Haku opponent got closer enough to be more than just a faint green blur in the mist, Sasuke scowled. "I've heard about you, fake hunter-nin."

"So have I, Uchiha-san," Haku responded stoically, his mask hiding a sigh at the meaningless violence that would soon issue. "My master seems impressed by your agility... but are you fast enough to keep up with me?"

Sasuke then smirked, twirling his kunai once in response. "That's my line."

Their fight began immediately afterwards.

Being both speed-based fighters, Haku and Sasuke ran at each other as fast as they could, intent on doing some damage with their weapons.

Sasuke's kunai met resistance as he entered a blade lock with Haku, if you could call it that. _'An... icicle? Where did that come from?'_ the Uchiha wondered. He applied more power to his blocked attack, but disengaged upon seeing that he wouldn't get Haku to budge.

The two continued to poke each other's defenses, assessing their strength and speed as best as they could. Sasuke also had another objective, which was to test the sturdiness of Haku's thin icy weapon.

 _'It doesn't matter how much strength I put into my blows, it won't break,'_ the Uchiha concluded grimly. He had tried striking both with the sharp tip of the kunai and the blunter area in the middle that was perfect for breaking solid structures, but the only reaction he got out of Haku's weapon was an almost metallic cling each time they met.

 _'Ice can't be that strong... what is wrong with that thing?'_ Sasuke continued to think, parrying blows and retaliating with his own as he and Haku moved across the wet surface of the bridge. The genin's frustration only grew as their fight continued.

Throughout the exchange of blows, it became clear to both boys that they were evenly matched in strength and speed, with Haku having a slight advantage in reach. The fight would come down to their stamina if they kept fighting as they were, but with their level of speed they couldn't count on ninjutsu or projectiles. They would be left vulnerable for far too long.

It was clear to Sasuke that a change of tactics was in order.

 _'I can't force an opening... so I will need to have him drop his guard on his own. But how? ...Oh.'_ his onyx eyes widened, and the Uchiha had to suppress the smirk that was threatening to appear on his face. _'Of course!'_

Purposefully keeping the annoyance on his features, Sasuke advanced more recklessly towards Haku. His swings were wider, his thrusts deeper, and there was more power put into his slashes. The tactic failed to break through Haku's defenses, but it got the desired effect out of the masked ninja.

 _'He is becoming desperate,'_ the Ice user observed with relief. Finally, Haku thought, the fight could end. Sasuke's furious blows had more power put on them, which meant the Uchiha took more time to recover from his own exertion. In a fight where their speed was equal, this was a huge mistake.

Haku had been making an effort to meet his enemy's attacks head on until then, but this time he allowed Sasuke's swing to cut through the misty air and went for the finishing blow once the genin had left an opening.

Or so he thought.

"Gnnh..." Haku groaned, not expecting to be forced into another blade lock at that moment. It was then that he realized that the wide swings he had been hoping to exploit were a trap all along.

And while beneath the boy's mask there was a frown, Kakashi was smiling behind his own. _'It looks like those late night spars didn't help only Naruto,'_ the jonin realized.

Catching an attack was nothing special, but Sasuke had struck just his enemy went for a thrust. The end result was that the Yuki had been caught in a bad position to withstand Sasuke bringing his kunai down on him. The thin icicle could handle the stress for a long time, but Haku's wrist wouldn't.

Haku became calm once again after the surprise faded. He knew that Sasuke's smirk of superiority was just evidence of the younger boy's ignorance.

"We only want the bridge builder, not you or your friends," the masked boy spoke in a hushed tone meant only for his enemy. "If you retreat now you can still escape unharmed."

It was going against Zabuza's orders, but after hearing what his master planned to do with the children, Haku hoped that there was a way for them to avoid such a fate.

"Shut up," Sasuke shot him down, still grinning with excitement. "Asking for mercy when things don't go your way? How pathetic."

"You believe you have the advantage. At a first glance, you'd be correct, but I have two key advantages over you," Haku informed, prompting Sasuke to snort.

"Oh yeah?" His smirk widened once he noticed how much Haku's hand was trembling. "And what would they be?" he dared to ask, calling Haku's bluff... supposedly.

"Firstly, we are surrounded by water." Though his tone had indicated confidence, Sasuke's eyes darted around to confirm his enemy's claim nonetheless. "But more importantly, I have one of your hands immobilized. You cannot use ninjutsu right now."

"The same goes for you. Water hardly means anything when _I_ have _your_ hand locked," Sasuke countered.

"The same goes for me? I wonder..."

Sasuke felt a chill going down his spine as his opponent began to weave seals with the one hand he still had free to move. _'Impossible!'_

"Hand signs with a single hand...!" Kurenai whispered in awe, disbelief and fear all at once.

"I've never seen anything like this before!" Kakashi commented in a similar state of shock

Both jonin were unaffected by the laughter that their words caused on Zabuza, but the younger ninja couldn't say the same.

"Guys, I think Sasuke is in trouble. Big trouble," Kiba spoke through gritted teeth, relaying what he had heard from the jonin-sensei. From where they were, protecting Tazuna, Sasuke's duel couldn't be seen with full clarity, and the words they spoke could go by unheard at times unless you had sensitive hearing.

His companions didn't react to the statement outwardly. Sakura was trying to calm down, telling herself that Sasuke would be alright, whereas Shino was struggling to observe and learn what he could in case the Uchiha failed.

Hinata's Byakugan, however, let her watch far more than her teammates could. She saw how the masked enemy's chakra seeped into the water that surrounded Sasuke and himself, focusing on hundreds of random points on the surface. The thin strands of chakra connecting Haku and the water, almost like a web of chakra, became all the more visible as the Yuki raised his hand and the water with it, forcing more energy down the invisible lines as their ends moved in midair, surrounding Sasuke from all sides.

The mist blocked her vision from discerning that the water had solidified, turning what were once harmless drops into thin needles of ice. However, she still was able to see Sasuke sending a steady stream of chakra down his legs.

"Hyoton: Thousand Needles of Death," Haku announced, ending the sequence of signs. Making use of his natural speed in addition to a body flicker, Haku easily avoided his own attack, evading the frozen bullets in less than the one second they needed to converge on Sasuke

They came with enough force to destroy the concrete surface of the bridge, leaving a deformed crater on their landing point that was hidden from view by the cloud of dust, stone, and water that rose from the impact.

When the smokescreen disappeared, Haku saw that so did Sasuke. The sound of metal piercing the air was the only clue as to where the genin had gone.

Haku hopped backwards to dodge the shuriken incoming from the sky and struggled to maintain his balance as more came, forcing him to retreat even further until he saw that the last two incoming shuriken would miss him completely.

As the steel stars passed by his sides harmlessly, the ice-user made use of his enemy's mistake to stand up... only to feel a strong pull on his ankles as Sasuke manipulated the wires connected to these last two stars.

The unexpected pull sent him to the ground, his weapon almost slid out of his hands. Scowling, Haku quickly slashed at the strings, freeing his legs... but it was only when he found himself flying across the bridge after Sasuke's foot crashed into his mask that he realized he hadn't been fast enough.

"Now it's time for my counterattack!" Sasuke declared, blurring through the seals his father had taught him. "Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu!"

Zabuza shook his head as he watched his fallen pupil being forced to sink into the water puddle to dodge the enemy's flames, his dagger-like icicle left to melt a couple feet away from where it landed after the kick.

"That was so cool! Did you guy see that?" Sakura squealed from afar, wisely keeping her tone just low enough as to not be overheard by the jonin. "Isn't Sasuke-kun the best!?"

Tazuna and the genin from Team 8 watched the pinkette warily.

"Um... I can see where you are coming from, but..." Hinata mumbled to her friend, reacting without putting much thought into her words or her tone of roundabout disagreement

"Oy, you two! Now is _really_ not the time for this stuff!" Kiba rolled his eyes exasperatedly, while his only remaining teammate sighed. "Leave the girl talk to when we are safer. Or at least when I'm not near. Please."

"I must concur." Shino offered lamely, equally annoyed. "Focus on the mission."

Tazuna just shook his head. _'Ah... not the best time to remember when my girl was that age,'_ he lamented, noting how "pinky" had only partially accepted the criticism and kept the fangirling to herself, whereas the other girl's cheeks flared up in shame as she tried to get a better look at the fight.

Sasuke and Haku once again were fighting in close quarters, but Sasuke had the decisive advantage due to being the only armed combatant between them. The Ice-user was slippery, weaving through gaps in the Uchiha's attacks to remain safe while lashing out with his legs or arms in an attempt to create enough space to safely draw another weapon, but raw taijutsu wasn't his specialty.

Not having the same worries himself, Sasuke maintained an aggressive approach that made use of the sharp, longer reach his kunai provided. He still avoided his enemy's blows, but found himself growing frustrated with the lack of results despite how the fight seemed to be in his favor. Armed or not, Haku still was fast.

The uneven circumstances between them finally favored the genin, as an attempt to duck under the more dangerous slashing attacks from Sasuke made Haku vulnerable to another kick to the head. It sent Haku flying a couple meters, almost to the lateral edges of the bridge where he lay on the ground, unmoving. The chakra-enhanced mask that protected his face even from Hinata's all-seeing eyes, however still remained whole and unscathed.

Pointing his kunai at the fallen Haku, Sasuke relaxed his posture slightly. If he had chosen to throw his kunai, it would have killed its target. _'I won,'_ he smiled to himself, reveling in the surge of emotions that emerged from his victory.

"So you thought you were faster, huh?" he taunted his downed opponent, feeding his ego just a little more. "Maybe you were right. But in the end you lost anyways" he continued, ignoring the quite audible whine from Kiba, who claimed he could be faster than both.

"Great work, Sasuke," Kakashi congratulated him from afar, still keeping Zabuza in his sights.

"Looks like investing in an "imported tool" from the Land of Snow didn't pay off," Kurenai provoked the Mist jonin.

"Don't compare Haku to those losers," Zabuza spat in disgust. "Their farce of an Ice Release is nothing more than frozen Water techniques. They don't have the affinities for Wind and Water mixed in their veins like Haku does."

"A kekkei genkai... makes sense," Kakashi muttered, realizing why his Sharingan failed to copy the boy's technique. The Land of Snow's Ice Release users could only freeze water, but the bloodline limit of the Yuki clan allowed them to create ice from nothing, in addition to solidifying liquids.

On the opposite side of the bridge, Zabuza couldn't keep himself from shaking his head. He knew that his best tool had been groomed as a mid-range assassin rather than a close-quarter assault ninja, but Haku's performance still disappointed. "It seems we still have more to work with," he muttered in disgust. He had been hoping to teach the boy swordplay after this mission, in preparation to futurely presenting him with the Nuibari needle-sword after conquering Kirigakure, but clearly, Haku was far from ready.

Zabuza could understand testing an opponent, but if there was one thing that all Swordsmen of the Mist had in common in their fighting style, is that they didn't hold back. "Haku, stop playing around," Zabuza chastised his pupil, who struggled to get up. "Show them what true Hyoton looks like"

"Very well," the masked boy conceded stoically, making Sasuke reassume his fighting stance once he realized the fight was far from over.

Hinata couldn't hide her gasp when she saw the great amount of chakra the boy began to gather. His previous technique had barely used his chakra since it froze real water, but to prepare enough for his technique Haku needed to create huge amounts of ice from nothing. Of course, the mist still messed with her Byakugan's eyesight, but when Haku focused well over half of total reserves, the boy started to shine brightly through the mist, almost like a torch.

The glow suddenly was gone as thick plates of pure chakra-made ice started forming all around Sasuke, and the distribution of chakra no longer allowed Hinata to gather any information on him. The Uchiha, wary, choose to watch rather than run lest he triggered a trap... not knowing that staying inside was the worst mistake he could possibly make in that situation.

Kakashi recognized the danger—or rather, felt it. He didn't know what the mysterious boy's kekkei genkai was capable of, but his hunches were never wrong. _'I need to do something, and fast,'_ the silver-haired man resolved.

Behind them, Sakura began to shiver from the cold air that was mixed with mist. "Guys," she called out to the genin of Team 8, "is is just me or is it freezing over here?" she asked in a shaky voice as her confidence in Sasuke's skills wavered.

"Nope," Kiba confirmed grimly. He and his actual teammates were all coincidentally well dressed for a colder climate despite the season, and even them felt the cold. "That guy is doing something."

"No... i-it's not just him!" Hinata called out in fear, and before she could explain what her dojutsu allowed her to see, Kakashi made his move.

Or at least that was the man's intention, until Zabuza materialized in front of him to block his advance. "My, Kakashi. I thought we had an agreement?" the Kiri shinobi bared his fangs in an unseen grin behind his mask of bandages, drawing his massive sword from his back.

"What are you up to, Zabuza?" the Copy Ninja almost growled at the enemy, flicking his right wrist to release the kunai hidden beneath the sleeve.

"Well, you're in luck; I've grown tired of waiting," Zabuza continued, ignoring Kakashi's question as an extremely wide, thin sheet of ice suddenly sprouted from the ground, cleanly separating the bridge into two sections. Kakashi barely had the time to register that fact as a giant blade came upon him.

While the thick plates of ice still hadn't fully formed around Sasuke and Haku, the significantly thinner wall of ice that was now separating Sasuke and the jonin from Tazuna and the other genin rose almost instantly. The ice construct was not only wide enough to stop one from walking to the other side, but it was also tall enough that even an experienced jonin would be hard pressed to vault over it with a chakra jump.

Knowing that they could not expect any backup from their strongest companions set the genin surrounding Tazuna in a state of shock and panic.

"Wait, what!?" Kiba blurted out. "That masked guy locked us out of the fight...!"

"But why!?" Sakura questioned, worried and just as confused.

Before someone could try to give her an answer, the usually quiet Hinata surprised everyone by screaming as high as she could. "Sensei! Watch out!"

The girl's Byakugan allowed her to see how the air surrounding Kurenai began glowing strongly. Though the mist blurred her vision, it was only a dim glow, unlike the brightness that she could now see floating around her teacher.

Alarmed, Kurenai's gaze darted around the environment just as she was moving to strike at Zabuza with a kunai, but she saw nothing that signified the danger her student spoke of. The only thing out of the ordinary was the sharp drop in the temperature, but she had thought it came from Haku's technique affecting the surrounding area.

Sparing a glance to said masked nin, she managed to catch a glimpse of Sasuke attempting to attack him while the jutsu had yet to be completed, but the boy's ability to form hand seals without both hands allowed him to intersect Sasuke's kunai and shuriken with senbon while continuing to mold chakra, much to the Uchiha's growing frustration.

"Dammit," she barely made out the genin cursing.

Silently, her focus shifted back to Kakashi and Zabuza's fight, and seeing that her ally was keeping the enemy busy, Kurenai even turned around to scout for a potential danger before she could safely move to help Sasuke. For the most part the mist was just strong enough to mess with the casting of illusions, but her sight wasn't as impaired as it had been during the first encounter with the Demon of the Hidden Mist.

Still, in the instants it took her to scan her surroundings, she saw nothing.

"Hinata! What did... huh?" The question died on her lips as Kurenai watched her own breath, visible due to how cold the environment became after Zabuza's student formed his latest jutsu.

The problem? She hadn't seen the same happening with Sasuke.

"So you finally noticed?" Kurenai heard a muffled feminine laugh, coming from somewhere beyond the thicker parts of the mist that she only then realized were there to begin with—the distance and blurred vision fooling her senses.

"Show yourself!" the Genjutsu Mistress demanded, on guard. _'That he'd bring only one person as a backup... it was too good to be true.'_

"Kurenai, get out of there!" Kakashi shouted, spotting the amalgamation of chakra Hinata had seen by mere luck as he and Zabuza traded blows across the bridge.

"Too late," the swordsman sneered, not stopping his assault to let his fellow masked jonin to see what would become of his partner.

"Hyoton: Ice Prison!"

Responding to those words, the Ice chakra gathered around Kurenai exploded, freezing everything in its blast radius. The stone ground, the air... and Kurenai herself, all perfectly encased in a dome of solid ice.

"You sure took your sweet time executing that jutsu, sister," Haku teased as a figure emerged from the mist.

"Like you can say anything! _Your_ jutsu isn't even done yet," the girl countered, the annoyed frown on her face evident in her voice despite the mask that covered it. "And you know that making so much ice without water isn't exactly easy for me."

Just as she was done speaking, the final mirror of ice formed directly above Sasuke, blocking the one escape route that had allowed him to avoid Haku's first technique. "In that case, why don't you move beyond the Ice Barrier? My opponent provided plenty of water for you to use... and for your information, my Demonic Ice Mirrors are finally complete, despite the distractions."

The comment made Sasuke grit his teeth and tighten his hold on his kunai. He looked around and saw that despite his attempts to rush at Haku, the boy's knowledge of the Shunshin no Jutsu and his high skill with needles allowed him to escape and avoid him until the technique could be fully executed.

For the most part, he was just annoyed at the Ice-user. It was only when Haku turned away from him that Sasuke felt another thing: shock.

 _'He's turning his back on me!?'_ he thought incredulously, instantly preparing a kunai to throw... when Haku touched the mirror and started to _enter_ inside it. "What the hell is this...!?"

His fellow genin weren't able to witness that, but between seeing Kurenai becoming completely frozen and another masked ninja showing up, only to phase through the wall of ice as if it were water... they couldn't help but be shocked as well.

"So another enemy has appeared," Shino spoke up, recovering faster than the others. "Which of us shall engage her?"

The question was aimed at Kiba—the team's appointed leader—but a drawn out growl from the disguised Akamaru distracted him. "What was that, boy?"

This time, the dog in human form barked, and Kiba sniffed the air in response. _'Huh... she does smell familiar. Not just because the masked guy smells similarly but... have we met before?'_ he wondered, as Haru slowly approached the group.

"Hey, Kiba," Sakura's voice drew his attention. "Are you even listening?"

"Uh... sure!" he lied shamelessly. "I'm fine. What were you guys saying...?"

"What a great leader you're turning out to be," he heard Sakura scoff and was just about to snap at the girl when Tazuna chose to intercede.

"Sunglasses asked you which kids will fight and which will stay with me."

80% of that question was easy to answer, almost obviously so.

With their limited combat abilities, Shino and Sakura would serve better protecting Tazuna than by getting into a fight due to how the mist restricted them. Kiba and his ninken, however, weren't impaired by the mist and could fight with some efficiency inside of it, which meant they would be at the frontlines for sure. The one thing that left him pondering was whether to take his one female teammate with him or not. _'Hinata should be able to fight without too many problems, but if I take her away from Tazuna and there's a fourth enemy hidden somewhere around here...'_

"Kiba-kun, take me with you."

Turning around, he saw that said Hyuuga was staring at him with determination. Not wholly, given that her legs were shaking to a degree... but the girl seemed resolved to fight.

"Hinata, are you sure?" he asked anyways, unable to stop his tone from showing worry. Tazuna aside, he didn't want to needlessly endanger his teammate's life.

"I... I know it will not be much, but please let me help!" she insisted.

Unsure, Kiba's gaze fell to Shino. "It is unlikely that another enemy will appear," the bug-user supplied.

"We can handle things out here," Sakura said supportively, motioning towards the Aburame. Like the bluenette, she knew what needed to be done, even though neither were fully confident in their ability to do their jobs.

"...Alright, let's go Hinata, Akamaru!"

With a short-lived smile, the Hyuuga nodded and followed her teammate as he dashed off towards their newest foe, both of them drawing a kunai as they moved.

Getting closer, Hinata was able to see that their enemy's skin was covered in a faint amount of chakra, almost as if it were a skin-tight armor. Additionally, she could also spot a thin trail of chakra connecting the girl to the ice structure that was trapping Kurenai, right through the barrier that separated them. Worried, she reported her findings to Kiba while she still could.

Meanwhile, a few feet away from the Ice Barrier she had created, Haru sighed. _'Looks like I'll be fighting one of them.'_

Even tough Haru had told herself that she'd have no problems fighting one of the kids she had met a few days prior, now that she knew that would be sentencing the girl to afate worse than death —blindness and prostitution— instead of just killing her, she felt conflicted about engaging the shy Hyuuga and being directly responsible for her fate.

 _'Still, Zabuza-sama saved my life. As his tool, I can't spit on his benevolence by going against his orders,'_ she reminded herself, taking a small amount of her chakra to form a simple ice staff in her hands.

The staff was two meters long and a bit thicker than the girl's arm. The weapon also had been given more attention in the molding process than her brother's, appearing to be an actual structure carved out of ice rather than a random, jagged icicle.

"So you're the one that froze Kurenai-sensei, right?" Kiba growled when he deemed to be close enough to the enemy, skipping the pleasantries to get to the heart of the matter.

"Exactly, and if you wish to free the Genjutsu Mistress, you will have to go through me," she posed the challenge, eager to fight despite what would come afterwards.

"Funny, we were going to kick your butt anyways," the Inuzuka smirked at her, before glancing at his partners. "Akamaru, Hinata, you two ready?" he asked in a lower tone.

The ninken barked in agreement instantly, but Hinata took a moment to swallow her own fears and insecurities before answering with a silent nod and moving into the Jyuuken's favored fighting stance.

 _'Kiba-kun is counting on me, even if he doesn't think too much of my fighting ability,'_ she thought, mistaking the Inuzuka's earlier protective instincts for a lack of trust. _'There's no room for failure this time, Hinata,'_ the bluenette lectured herself, almost giving her father's tone to her mental voice.

"It seems all three of you are ready," Haru observed, entering into a battle stance of her own. Kiba and Hinata couldn't help but note that it resembled the form Zabuza took right before his duel with Kakashi began. "Fine; come!"

Unable to say no to the invitation, Kiba, Hinata, and Akamaru charged at their opponent.

* * *

"Aaarrghh...!"

The sounds of needles piercing the air and the scream that followed once they struck Sasuke were the only things that could be heard inside of the dome of mirrors Haku had conjured.

 _'This guy... is impossibly fast!'_ Sasuke remarked in his mind, almost curling up on the ground from both pain and a feeble attempt to dodge part of the rain of steel that was falling on him.

 _"Now, I'll show you the true meaning of speed,"_ the Uchiha remembered the masked ninja promising from within one of his mirrors, right before his reflection began to "spread" to the other mirrors. Which one held the real Haku he wasn't sure, given that every single one of them had the same reflection on their surface.

Sasuke barely comprehended how the attack started. All he saw was the faint blurs from the needles and the green-clothed ninja that was throwing them. Whether it was pure speed or some trick, Sasuke felt as if the enemy was everywhere at the same time.

 _'Which one is real? Or... are all of them real!?'_ he had questioned himself then, and he was no closer to finding out than he had been before.

Once the volley of needles ceased, Sasuke took the brief respite to scan his surroundings while the pain wasn't messing with his ability to think too badly. _'No... while clones would be possible, he wouldn't need the mirrors if that was the trick. It can't be genjutsu either, because of the mist. One of them—and only one—is real. But how do I find him?'_

"No matter how much you look, you won't figure out the secret," Haku commented, and Sasuke took note the voice could only come from the mirror facing him, almost as if tauntingly, knowing that he was safe from harm and could talk as much as he wanted.

It didn't take a genius to know Haku wasn't fighting seriously. With the speed he had exhibited, striking in a lethal spot wouldn't be hard for the masked boy... and even leaving that aside, it was clear to Sasuke that running away or attacking at range would only work if Haku allowed him to.

It made his blood boil with anger.

 _'This bastard is just toying with me! None of his attacks were killing strikes... but why!?'_

On one of the edges of the frozen cage-like structure, Haku was mulling over the very same fact. _'I was ordered to spare him if I could as Zabuza-sama wanted me to drag out the fight as long as possible in hopes of making him awaken the Sharingan... but we don't know the condition for that to happen,'_ he lamented. The secrets of Konoha didn't find their way into Kiri's information network often, and as missing-nin, Zabuza and his pupils were even less able to gather intel on the Uchiha clan's fabled dojutsu. _'I suppose I will have to slow down slightly to see if his eyes can't get used to my speed—perhaps forcing them to their limits is the key here. But before that... hm?'_

With mild curiosity, Haku noted the fury in Sasuke's eyes. Though not in the way Zabuza had wanted, the Uchiha was definitely seeing red. Throwing caution to the wind, the genin recklessly started to blaze through the hand seals his father had taught him as fire began to gather in his lungs.

Haku recognized the jutsu and the futility of the attempt, but unnoticed by Sasuke, his true body quickly flashed between the ice mirrors to appear behind the younger boy. This was mostly out of caution, because the flames that Sasuke breathed barely even melted the mirror as Haku predicted.

"Common sense would dictate that fire is effective against ice, yes... but this is no normal ice," Haku gave his enemy a hint. His bloodline's Ice Release didn't have a particular weakness or strength against Katon jutsu such as Sasuke's, unlike the Wind and Water chakra affinities that composed it, respectively.

"Fire could actually melt my mirrors," he continued, "but you'd need to have flames much stronger than those."

Sasuke took the tip as an insult, feeling even more humiliated than before as he turned around to glare at the mirror directly behind him. "Damn you..."

Ignoring the snarled offense, Haku addressed him evenly. "As I am sure you are now aware, you cannot defeat me. I am significantly faster than you, and you cannot force me out of my mirrors. However, we do not need to keep fighting. Like I said before, we want the bridge builder, not you. Give up now and you may yet keep your life."

Though it went against Zabuza's plans, Haku's loyalty to the man only went so far. Unlike his sister, he wasn't a true follower of the Demon of the Hidden Mist, and while he indeed feel indebted to the man, Haku saw Zabuza mostly as a way to grow stronger to protect his sister and free Kirigakure from Yagura's rule.

The swordsman's plans for Sasuke and his eyes didn't sit well with someone that abhorred violence as much as Haku.

It disgusted him.

However, Zabuza was currently stuck fighting Kakashi and couldn't pay attention to what was happening between the Demonic Ice Mirrors. It wouldn't be hard for Haku to lie to the swordsman and make him believe that he had been forced to kill Sasuke in their battle, even though the Uchiha would be just left in a near-death state, albeit one less intense than what he had put Zabuza through.

"Heh..." Sasuke chuckled, despite not really being in a position to. "You think... that after all of this, I'm giving up? There's no way in hell I'm stopping before I defeat you." Whether it was his wounded pride that was speaking louder than reason or simply that he had spent more time listening to Naruto than it was healthy to, Sasuke couldn't stop himself from turning away Haku's offer.

 _'This is just like that Itachi genjutsu... he didn't kill me straight away, so he has a purpose. As long as he isn't fighting seriously then I still should have a chance to win,'_ the Uchiha thought. _'And losing is not an option. The others are alone with another masked ninja and they might need my help,'_ he noted with displeasure, having witnessed what had happened to Kurenai before the first wave of needles came.

The feeling only intensified when he reminded himself of the big problem he was facing. _'If only I could see him... if only I could use the Sharingan...!'_

Meanwhile, Haku sighed. Seeing the resolution on Sasuke's eyes—but no Sharingan—he resigned himself to the fate his opponent had chosen and gathered a fistful of needles from a pouch on the inside of his robes. When he next spoke, his voice was as frigid and emotionless as the element that his chakra was naturally attuned to.

"Very well, Uchiha-san. Then so be it."

* * *

"Crud..." Kiba cursed, cradling his aching rib as he realized how much of a strategic mistake rushing at the enemy had been. In his mind, forcing the fight to happen away from the bridge builder would have been the best choice, but the situation changed as Haru revealed her weapon.

Though she handled the thing mostly as if it were a greatsword rather than a staff, it allowed Haru to fend off multiple opponents at once, and with the battle happening so close to the Ice Barrier that had split the bridge in two, getting behind the girl to attack from her blind spot seemed all but impossible to the Konoha genin.

 _'If only these guys weren't trained to fight on this blasted mist... then I could have used a smoke ball here, but that's not going to do anything,'_ he thought, unaware that his foe would indeed have been impaired by a smokescreen.

Having been launched by a thrust to the gut, Kiba had crashed into the wet and slippery surface of the bridge and slid away from the fight. Luckily, his chainmail and thick coat prevented him from being outright impaled by the blunt staff, but it still made him unable to do anything but watch as both Hinata and Akamaru got repelled by a single wide swing.

On the good side, the hit that had caught Akamaru's side hadn't been strong enough to dispel his transformation... but it also had left Hinata momentarily unconscious when the frozen weapon struck her left temple, leaving the girl sprawled on the ground and bleeding from the resulting gash.

"Honestly, I was expecting a little more from this fight..." Haru lamented earnestly, having been hoping to test the skills she had fought so hard to learn. Zabuza still was reluctant at times to bring her to combat-heavy missions, and she was looking at this mission as a chance to prove herself capable of handling them.

To Kiba, it all came across as a taunt, given that the masked girl refused to move from her spot a couple meters in front of the Ice Barrier. She had, of course, no need to throw away the advantageous position, but he growled at her nonetheless.

"Unh..." Hinata moaned, recovering her senses with some difficulty, as the throbbing pain in her head made her thought process hazy. She still had enough in her to try to get up, and in doing so noticed how the water on the ground was making the process hard.

"Come on, you three. I don't have all day to waste on you!" Haru now legitimately provoked them, seeing no need to resort to actual ninjutsu just yet. Her chakra reserves, considering the amount of chakra saved by the water surrounding the battlefield, were barely even drained after her two techniques... but she had a plan to conserve chakra as the battle went on, just in case.

Her idleness gave Hinata the free opportunity to reactivate her Byakugan, and what she saw made her gasp, only loud enough to be detected by the sensitive hearing of her teammate and his dog. "She's moving the water from the clones closer to us and freezing the floor," she whispered, to which Kiba replied with a small nod and a flash of his fangs to the enemy as he realized exactly why she was managing to send them so far away after her attacks.

The Hyuuga could see, to an extent, how the water that was far back to where Tazuna and the others were was for the most part mixed with chakra... while the wet area that could be considered their battlefield was glowing in a different intensity, just the same as the Hyoton techniques both masked ninja had used thus far.

 _'And that layer of chakra on her skin is also worrying. Could that be Ice, too?'_ she mused, unsure of what to do next but attack head-on—a strategy that had been proven to be subpar at best.

Almost as in response to her thoughts, her eyes widened slightly when she spotted Kiba quickly scratching the stone floor with his kunai. _'That's what Shino-kun did on the bell test!'_

Between the usually bad calligraphy of the Inuzuka and the urgency the situation required, the writing hasn't been as polished as Kiba would have liked, but Hinata could read "dodge, go for the wall" as clear as day by her teammate's feet. _'Ah, I see! If I focus on dodging, I might be able to get past her and destabilize the barrier with Jyuuken! Then we can surround her from all sides!'_

"Okay, let's all attack again!" Kiba rallied his partners after hearing a mumbled affirmative from Hinata.

Haru, who had been watching them all warily from her safe spot, became even more suspicious of the Inuzuka's actions once he began executing hand signs and focused her sights on him as the group advance up until the moment he fell to all fours and remained there. Despite her mild curiosity, she was forced to give attention to the transformed Akamaru.

The dog-in-human-form lunged to do a low slash at his enemy's leg, forcing Haru to respond with a wide downward sweep before the attack could be fully executed, grazing Akamaru's ribs mid-jump. Hinata approached an instant later and was just about to thrust her palm at the masked girl when her ambush was reacted to.

Converting her motion into another attack, Haru shifted the momentum of the swing to try and catch Hinata on the head once again, but this time, instead of being caught off-guard, she made use of the icy floor and threw herself into a skid, bending her entire body just enough to avoid the blow, passing behind Haru unharmed.

Once again, the masked girl hardly acknowledged the maneuver as Kiba pounced on her, moving and attacking at speeds the genin hadn't shown during the first few minutes of the fight. Instead of clawing his way through like he usually preferred to do when under the effects of the Four Legs Technique, now the Inuzuka held a kunai in his right hand to aid him in making up for the reach disadvantage.

Gritting her teeth beneath the mask, Haru did her best to fend off the strikes while trying to switch her grip on the staff, forgoing Zabuza's teachings for her self-taught bojutsu ones. It lowered her range, but allowed her to fend off Kiba's slices more quickly while sneaking in some of her own in the brief duel.

A duel that she got the upper hand on when Kiba faltered thanks to his teammate's exclamation.

"I-I can't break this!" Hinata called out in distress. Though she could infuse chakra within the extra-thin plate of ice, hey Byakugan told her the chakra was somehow absorbed into the ice. The Ice Barrier even became slightly thicker in the areas she did try striking with the Gentle Fist. "It's similar what the books said about the Shodaime's Wood Release... this drains chakra!"

The draining power of Hyoton wasn't a match to the Mokuton that Hashirama Senju had been famous for, but it was more than enough to completely absorb something that used as little chakra as a Jyuuken strike.

Upon closer inspection, she noticed another problem. "And freezes on contact as well!" she panicked, seeing the tips of her pointed and middle fingers lightly encased in frost. To her relief, a burst of expelled charka quickly got rid of the problem, but that was a luxury Hinata knew would only be available to herself.

"Dammit!"

Whether Kiba cursed because of the new information or because of the kick Haru landed on his already wounded ribs, Hinata didn't know. She was too busy realizing that, by failing to break the Ice Barrier, she didn't have the room needed to deal with the masked enemy.

Kiba and Akamaru had both been tossed to the ground and Hinata herself was in a bad position... but the truly dangerous element was that Haru had finished bringing most of the water to what was effectively their battlefield.

Straining her vision, Hinata could see more parts of the floor had actually been frozen. _'We are sliding on the floor each time she managed to hit us, so we can't approach her. Her abilities are all geared towards defense, in some manner or another...'_

Her luck was still going strong, however, as Haru didn't see Hinata as enough of a threat to press her advantage while she could. The masked girl merely turned her head to glance at the Hyuuga while keeping the other two in her field of vision.

"I don't know what exactly you were aiming to do by breaking the ice," she stated with some amusement, "but that's not going to work. Neither you nor your doggish teammate will be able to pass with the level of strength Zabuza-same said you two have."

"That's what we are going to see!" Kiba challenged, moving towards Akamaru as the dog did the same. "Hinata, keep her busy for a minute!"

"Y-yes!" the blunette answered, not at all confident she would be able to cover for Kiba if he had truly meant one minute as the full sixty seconds let alone just a couple, but she moved to strike Haru nonetheless.

Frowning beneath her mask, the Hyoton-user whirled around in time to block a couple of shuriken and sidestep a kunai thrust. As Hinata had overextended herself, Haru immediately went to bring her staff on the back of the younger girl's head, but the Byakugan showed the move coming and allowed Hinata to duck beneath the blow before even recovering from her own attack.

Still, Hinata didn't recover fast enough to keep the offensive up, and after another exchange of blows, the tides turned and Hinata found herself doing more dodging than attacking. She did manage to move enough around Haru so that she no longer had her back to the wall, though; now being the sole thing between her teammates and the enemy... and during a blocked finger poke, she confirmed that the ice staff Haru held didn't have the same freezing/draining properties that the mirror-like Ice Barrier had.

In the end, Hinata accomplished her task.

"Alright, Akamaru! Let's destroy this wall!"

That was the only warning Haru had before she saw Kiba and his partner execute their signature drill-like technique, the Gatsuuga, straight towards herself and Hinata.

Knowing that Zabuza wanted the Hyuuga alive, but forgetting that the girl's Byakugan would warn her of Kiba's attack ahead of time, Haru pressed an opening shoved both of her hands forward to push the smaller girl out of the drill's path before chakra-jumping away.

The central section of the frozen staff had collided strongly against Hinata's chest, throwing her to the ground. It hadn't been a complete loss given that she had managed to strike the masked girl's left hand during the two-handed thrust, and but once again, there was more to be discovered about Haru's techniques.

 _'I hit her, but my hand slid off her skin... could it be that she really has a layer of Ice covering her, like some sort of armor?'_ Hinata wondered, watching her opponent as she landed. The shy Hyuuga knew that while her attack had missed the mark slightly, it managed to connect with two joints on the enemy's hand. By all means, her grip on the staff should have been affected by the Jyuuken strike, but Haru still held on her weapon tightly as if nothing had happened

 _'That must have the same properties as the barrier, then,'_ she concluded, getting up from the wet, ice-coated floor with some difficulty, from both the terrain and the pain on her left breast and ribs.

Shifting her attention to said barrier, she saw Kiba and Akamaru connecting against it. The two did manage to start drilling through the barrier, but their spin began to slow down considerably once they made contact, until the Fang over Fang almost couldn't sustain itself anymore.

Both Inuzuka and ninken bounced away before that point, and looked up to see that the barrier was heavily scratched where their attack hit for all but one moment—the ice soon began to reform until no evidence of the attempt was left behind.

"What the hell is this thing...!?" Kiba swore indignantly. The Inuzuka clan were specialists in breaking down defensive jutsu, which made this failure to sting even harder.

"As long as you attack has chakra, it won't get past it," Haru said with a smile, pleased with her technique's performance and Kiba's bafflement. The smile soon went away as the boy started to sniff around with a surprised expression on his face, leaving the masked girl confused until a new voice boomed throughout the area.

Not just a new voice... multiple voices. Familiar voices!

"Then how about something that doesn't have chakra, then!?"

Following the sound, Haru witnessed a mass of orange running towards her barrier, multiple hands holding a steel beam as if it were a battering ram. Her widened once her brain made the comparison. _'I can't let those clones get near!'_

Dropping her staff, the Yuki frantically started to go through hand seals (with both hands—she wasn't as good as her brother just yet), but she was forced to drop her jutsu once she heard metal cutting air. By sheer instinct, she formed a small and thin sheet of ice on her palm, using it as a shield to deflect the kunai and shuriken Kiba and Hinata respectively tossed at her.

"Go Naruto!" Kiba called out to him, openly cheering the Uzumaki in contrast to the silent, pleased smile that Hinata wore as both watched the steel beam colliding against the barrier, breaking a hole into it and leaving Naruto to pass through unimpeded.

The cracks into the barrier began to spread in all directions, until it could no longer sustain itself and fell apart completely, sending shards of ice in random directions. For better or for worse, nobody got hurt by them.

"Gnhh... the barrier's one weakness..." Haru mumbled in disgust. Strong physical attacks could shatter it, but Zabuza had assured her none of the genin were capable of such a feat. Obviously, the swordsman hadn't taken the battlefield in consideration when affirming such a thing.

"Heh, take that! You guys thank Sakura-chan and Shino for the idea later!" One of the Narutos said while waving at them, completely unaware that Kakashi only barely stopped Zabuza from going after him. Of course, since the two jonin began their duel the fog had deepened, so it was not like Naruto would have seen them anyways.

"Sure, go help Sasuke! We can handle things from here!" Kiba answered with a thumbs-up, and the Naruto squad ran into the deep mist that covered the previously-inaccessible section of the bridge.

"You just sent your friend away to his death," Haru commented stoically. The blond didn't have the means to fight back against Haku, she knew... and unlike the Uchiha her sibling had no reason to spare the loud Uzumaki. "He isn't capable of defeating my brother."

"He will find a way," Hinata countered with absolute certainty.

"That idiot is crafty; he will be okay," Kiba agreed, still smirking. "But forget him; it's time for round 2! Right, Hinata?"

"Mnn!"

Haru shook her head at her opponents, scowling at them from behind her emotionless mask. "You want to continue? Fine! I'm tired of going easy on you three!"

"Oh yeah? You'll regret not going all-out from the start!"

With Kiba's promise hanging in the air, the battle began anew.

* * *

A/N

Yeah... I'm not very happy with this chapter. I think what Naruto said in the aftermath of his off-screen fight sums this up pretty well. ("Well, that was disappointing," if you forgot.)

But maybe it is the whole "lost content, had to redo a lotta stuff" thing that has gotten to me, since my beta loved it. Or maybe it is the battle scenes and the difficulty I had in doing them. Eh. I was also kind of planning on Naruto using a crane in that last scene too, but then I realized the obvious: it wouldn't have the speed required to make breaking through Haru's Ice Barrier believable.

Next chapter should wrap everything up. We will see what's up with Kakashi and Zabuza first and foremost, the two "genin vs masked person" fights, Gatou's interference... up until the return to Konoha. I'll explain what Naruto had been up to before showing up on the bridge, too.

So the chapter will be of the "bigger than 14K" variety that takes more than 4 weeks to write, too. I will also have tests in the beginning of October but I actually think I will do well enough for them to not detract too much from this (Mostly because the classes have been pretty weak), so I think a chapter at the very end of the month is feasible—but not certain.

Will be a little later than the 1-year anniversary, tho. Time sure flies.

...I've been a bit disappointed with the lack of response on the last chapter, especially given what went on in the middle... but then again, that's probably karma for the Arc Fatigue this fic probably fell into. And the delay. I'm sure the update going live in the middle of the week didn't help anyone, either. Not going to do that again.

And hey, if anyone is reading this on October 9th, give me a review for a birthday present! I will appreciate it!

Thanks to SimplePotato again for the beta work! All mistakes in this chapter, no matter the size, shape and form, are exclusively and 100% his fault, even those from parts I wrote after he sent the chapter beta'd to me. Especially those—I mean, sure, he wasn't involved, but that's not a valid excuse. He's still the guilty party!

Kidding. Though he does have part in the very last of the delays... it wasn't really his fault (his college screwed him over out of nowhere), but aim your torches and pitchforks at him nonetheless. Roast that Potato!

PS: This fic now has over **200k** words, with just 15,5 chapters (8, 9 and 13 count as 1,5 chapter to me). Gods, how did this happen? And will I get over 200 reviews, too? ...Unlikely, but I'd love to see you guys prove me wrong!

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.0.1

Corrected three instances where Haru's Ice Barrier was wrongly referred to as a fence. Remains of the chapter's beta version that got through, those.


	14. Chapter 14 - Road to Wave

Haha... hey there.

So, one year ago I posted the first chapter of this story, and I never thought it would amount to much... especially when changes in length and schedule happening and I found myself still drowning in Wave (hehe). But, getting over 400 follows, 200 reviews—I admit defeat, you guys proved me wrong!—and 300 favorites was well beyond any of my expectations!

Another thing that caught me off guard was the influx of reviews last chapter. I always get around 15 reviews per update and that was pretty much my aim, but I got almost twice that amount before the first week after the update was even over. What a surprise! I simply can't believe I actually got 201+ reviews so far. (considering a few deleted flames and one accidental victim of that purge...)

On to relevant matters: this is not a true update. Which you guys might have guessed by the low word count (those that got e-mails anyways)

This is just a small bonus story that I wrote to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the fic, since I knew I wouldn't be able to update in time for it but didn't want to leave that date pass by with nothing said.

It is canon to my story, but it is from a far future compared to where they are now. The story is also pretty short, but I hope you will enjoy it! It doesn't have any spoilers for the main books (besides that which I spoiled on my profile anyways), and was in fact built to leave a couple things foreshadowed for the next chapter. **(Even so, you might want to wait until Chapter 17 or perhaps even 18 before reading this, as it can kinda break the tension from last chapter-next chapter)**

ALSO!

This chapter is dedicated to everyone that has supported me with this story so far, but especially to three people:

SimplePotato, the beta, for being a pal and helping me out with this tale all this time. It's been over a year of me bothering him incessantly over this story and somehow he hasn't quit just yet. Guy can't take a hint; it just means I gotta try harder to get rid of him, I suppose! Joking... you rock, man.

Then there's _gio08_ , who left this story's second review and also is the only person that left a review for every single chapter so far! They were also nice enough to point out typos here and there in after-review PMs, which helped a lot.

Lastly, there's an unknown _guest_ who left me a review on my birthday and mentioned that they also have their birthday in October—the 25th! That is when this update is going live, so this one is a present for you! Happy birthday, guest!

Hope you all will enjoy it! (Note: answers to guest reviews will be at the end of the chapter. So if you weren't a guest reviewer you can ignore them, but there is some merit to reading them.)

* * *

 _Bonus Chapter_

Chapter 14: Road to Wave (Current Version:1.0)

* * *

"Wow...! Look, Boruto! There are so many ships! They look like toys from here!"

"Stop tugging at my arm, Hima! I can see them from here! Hey...!"

Naruto and Hinata smiled fondly as they watched their children admiring the bustling activity surrounding the islands of the Land of Waves. Despite Boruto's protests and scowl as he was dragged away, he seemed as mesmerized as his sister upon seeing ships for the first time in his life, even if from a distance. The glint in his eyes told the whole story.

After a rather hairy mission that took Naruto away from home for over three months instead of the planned two weeks and made him spend his anniversary apart from his family, the Uzumaki patriarch all but demanded to be given a vacation to compensate him for his troubles, given that the mission didn't exactly change rank and thus he wouldn't even have gotten extra pay for it. The Sixth Hokage was not at all in the mood to deal with him and quickly accepted the proposal, allowing Naruto to take his wife and the kids to a place he hadn't visited in well over a decade.

Currently, the four were walking on the bridge that Tazuna built to connect that island country to the Land of Fire all those years ago. They had been walking right in the center of the bridge, but thanks to Himawari half of their party was now close to the edges of the gigantic construction. Just as the young girl hadn't let go of her brother's arm after dragging him to see the ocean, the married couple had their hands linked even as they stopped to let the kids amuse themselves.

"It's been so long, hasn't it?" Hinata commented softly to her husband, leaning against his broad chest. Her eyes did not once waver from her children; the railings surrounding the bridge were tall and sturdy so there was no danger of the two falling into the sea, but she couldn't help doing it given what happened there once before.

"Yeah... it's hard to believe how much this place has changed after we left," Naruto agreed with her, not sharing the same worries. He, instead, was looking at the islands themselves, seeing the tall buildings visible even from far away—and not just on the main island, which held the capital. The kids grew up with such sights and thus weren't impressed, but comparing it to the assortment of small, modest houses that he had seen in his first and so far only visit to the place left quite the impression on him. The difference was striking.

"Getting rid of that scumbag Gatou did this place more good than I imagined," he continued.

"And we haven't even entered the country itself." Hinata tore her eyes away from her kids and looked at the cities across the islands as well. "It's good knowing that we were part of this; that we were able to change all of these people's lives for the better," she noted, watching as quite a few other people were traveling across the bridge as well.

"Oh yeah," their son interjecting, turning his head around with Himawari following suit. "You two were here before on a mission, right?"

"That's right! It was our first C-rank mission!" Naruto happily exclaimed, remembering the giddy feeling he had felt between the Sandaime Hokage giving them the mission and Tazuna's anticlimactic introduction.

"Even though it was practically an S-rank mission from our perspective..." Hinata added quietly.

"Uh...what was that, mom?" Boruto raised an eyebrow, his sister silently frowning as she tried to decipher her mother's mumbles, which as usual, didn't lead to anything.

 _'Some things never change,'_ Naruto shook his head slightly and tightened his hold on Hinata's hand, smiling. "What your mom was saying is that our mission was actually much more than a C-rank. We were supposed to just escort the old man who built this bridge back to his home—this thing here wasn't even halfway done back then. We were only supposed to worry about bandits, you know, but we got chased by a jonin on a forest back on that island over there," he pointed to the main island.

Himawari frowned. "But dad, I don't see any forests..."

"Probly got cut down to make room for those buildings, like back home" her brother shrugged and approached his parents once again. "So you had to flee from a bad guy?"

Hinata nodded, keeping a neutral expression that contrasted with Naruto's huge grin. "It was really scary... but our sensei managed to save us in the end. We had to fight that jonin's students a week later on this very bridge, though."

"Really?! Right here!?" Boruto exclaimed, and his sister's mouth was wide open. While both of the kids were clearly enraptured, a few people passing them by couldn't help but look after hearing the outburst.

Naruto noticed that. It reminded of how people used to look at him when he was unnecessarily loud. "Oi, settled down, Boruto! No need to make a scene," he scolded the boy, to which his wife responded with a giggle.

"You don't have a lot of credibility to be asking that of him," Hinata lightly teased him, making the man sigh

"Mom's right, Dad. You are usually even louder than Boruto!" the youngest Uzumaki piped in, giggling as well. Whereas she was mimicking her mom, her brother defiantly crossed his arms in front of his chest and stuck his tongue, as if saying "touché, old man!"

"Your father is far quieter now than when he was a kid, though."

"Hinataaaa! They didn't need to know that..." Naruto pitifully whined, shoulders sagging even more. Nowadays Naruto could hardly look back at his past self without cringing from embarrassment at the things he used to do, such as painting the Hokage monument or being an insufferable brat in general.

"Sorry, Naruto-kun," Hinata apologized as she leaned closer to him, clearly not meaning much by the apology.

Sometimes Naruto wondered if he had been a bad influence on the former Hyuuga as he watched the kids pressing them for further information, which Hinata supplied.

And talking about influences...

 **"Naruto,"** a deep voice rumbled from within his mind. It did not belong to him.

 _'What is it?'_

 **"I truly do not like to interfere in your personal matters, especially between you and your wife... but I noticed something that could become a problem later on."**

Naruto had a feeling he knew where this was going.

 **"There have been quite a few times where I've heard you scolding either of your kids, only for the princess to cut in and soften the blows to a degree. Your son is just as stubborn and hot-headed as you and your mother... if he stops respecting you that will surely cause conflicts between you two in the future. I recommend talking to her about it before it becomes a problem."**

 _'Ugh... I know. I hate to agree with you there, but you are right. I noticed that too, actually.'_

 **"Why have you done nothing about it, then?"**

 _'I know how Hinata is—she will be kicking herself over it for quite a while and I probably will feel guilty for bringing it up in the first place... I really didn't want to bring this up. I suppose I can't run away from it forever, though, But only after this vacation is over! Nope; I'm not gonna ruin this vacation for us.'_

Sensing acknowledgment from the voice that had spoken to him, followed by silence, Naruto focused on the real world again just in time to catch Hinata staring at him with a little concern.

"Is everything alright, dear?"

His mind scrambled for a good excuse to dodge the situation—she'd certainly press him on that very day later if she wasn't convinced— but luckily for him for him a flood of memories entered his head, giving him what he sought.

"The clones arrived at the hotel already."

"Oh. Were there any problems?" she probed further, to which Naruto shook his head.

"Everything went by without a hitch. They are bringing the luggage to our room now." Hinata narrowed her eyes a bit. "Well... there was this one employee that was kind of a jerk, but no big deal. Once they understood who they were talking to, everything went smoothly," he said, truthfully.

"No big deal, he says," Boruto rolled his eyes. "I'm sure the guy got a huge scare. You kept talking the entire trip about how you even got your name on the bridge."

"Aw, can you blame dad for it?" Himawari interceded. "It _is_ really cool to have your name on something like this!"

"...I don't see why that even happened, if you guys just fought the bad guy's minions."

"Well..." Naruto had to defend himself. "Those two were really strong! Me and uncle Sasuke fought just one and we almost died that day, and..."

As Naruto began to recount the ordeals he had been through during that day, the four of them resumed their walk. Hinata listened to her husband's tale and noted how quite a few details had been left out of the account he was giving to their kids.

 _'To them, the good guys defeated the bad guys and that is it... but it wasn't as cut and dry as that. If only we knew that back then... so much unnecessary blood was spilled..._

"Amazing...!"

"So you even fought the Mizukage...! I guess you did deserve having this bridge named after you, dad."

"Dad's the best!"

The wonder on the kids's voices brought Hinata back to reality.

"Yup! It was pretty tough, you know!" He grinned, pridefully. "But maybe tonight you guys will get a better idea why this bridge has my name on it. It wasn't just because of the fight."

"Right... so how far is the hotel from here anyways?" Boruto asked, in that one tone Naruto and Hinata associated with an incoming complaint. "I'm tired of walking so much. This bridge never ends!"

"Just... a little less than an hour," Hinata constated, quickly flashing her Byakugan to check. It was also quite easy to calculate the distance, since Naruto's clones when put together had more chakra than anything else in her massive range of vision and shined brightly to her special eyes.

"That much? You've gotta be kidding me... my legs feel like jelly from all this walking."

"Stop complaining, buddy! We're almost there," Naruto called out to the boy, grinning widely. "Your sister isn't complaining, so you can keep going too. Besides, what is our family's ninja way...?"

"We never give up!" Himawari exclaimed happily, with Boruto droning boredly right after.

Despite their son's lack of enthusiasm, the couple couldn't help but share a look of pride at hearing those four words coming out of their two children—their two most precious people in existence, who now upheld the ideals they had embraced so many years ago.

The mere thought that they were, together, a family... at one point the idea was nothing more than a dream of what could have never happened. It had seemed so impossible, and yet it became their reality.

While it had been close to a decade since Boruto had been born, Naruto and Hinata both still felt almost overwhelmed from the sheer happiness that even looking at their two children brought to them, no matter how much time had passed.

Meanwhile, Boruto shoved his hands in his pockets. "I know that... I never said I'd be giving up!" Boruto kept on whining, but in a low tone. He realized he had been complaining a little too much already.

"You know, this is your fault," Himawari pointed out, the smile on her face betraying the ache on her own legs. "You were the one that insisted on taking the slow way to see the sights."

"Shut up, Hima!"

Vengeance was sweet, the girl thought. _'But it is not enough.'_

"Boruto..." Naruto began, partially to break the fight, "If it's bothering you that much I could give you a shoulder ride till the hotel. It's been a while since we last did that, right?" he smiled at the boy, crouching to his level.

Naruto was hoping that Boruto would accept, since he missed carrying his son like that. The boy, too, loved the feeling of towering over everything and the closeness with his father... things just weren't the same after a certain someone got rid of his monopoly over both of his parents. He really, truly wanted to take his father up on his offer but...

He could _feel_ the stare aimed at his back.

With an eyebrow twitching, he shifted his gaze to that certain someone. Boruto could feel the promise of endless embarrassment behind those big, azure eyes his sister had. Eyes that promised that she would always remember this moment and that every single one of his friends would be informed of it... and that she'd bring it up at the worst possible moments.

Too risky. Far too risky!

"D-do I look like a child to you?! I'm way too old to do something as stupid as that," he blurted out without thinking, scowling and blushing a fair bit.

Naruto kept the smile on his face, even though he was hurt by the comment. "Alright... I was just—"

"If he doesn't want, I want it!" Himawari quickly interceded, jumping at her father's back before it got out of reach.

"Haha! Okay then! Up we go, little princess!"

Everyone but Boruto laughed happily at the scene, especially Himawari. Her smile, however, took a turn for thewicked at the exact moment her mother stopped looking, just because the girl was aware her brother was still staring.

The smugness in her smirk was simply not enough for her; she mouthed the word "checkmate" to him and turned away, giggling innocently.

Boruto's jaw almost broke when it hit the floor. _'I can't believe her! She... she planned everything?!This is so unfair...!'_

Resigned himself to his fate and doing his best to ignore his sister and father's happy mood and laughs as he continued to walk, unaware that Hinata had noticed him sulking after a while.

"What is the matter, my lightning?"

"Um... what are we going to eat? I mean, I know we will dine at that guy's house."

"Tazuna-san," she corrected him in a slight chiding tone, pausing before deciding to not press him further. "Yes, we will have dinner with him and his family, but I think we should eat in a restaurant for lunch. What do you think, dear?" she turned to his husband.

"Eh... I was looking forward to some of your food, to be honest." Naruto then glanced at the sky. "But it _is_ a little too late to start lunch, so I suppose I'll have to endure."

"Yay!" The little girl that was using Naruto's shoulders for a chair commemorated. "Chouchou-chan said good things about the food of this country!"

"Unless they are complaining, you shouldn't take an Akimichi seriously when the topic is food..." Boruto grumbled, but went ignored by Himawari.

"She spoke especially well about that dish... er... black beans and something?"

"Rice." Naruto almost vomited. "Please don't remind me of that, Hima... I have bad memories of the one time I tried that out when I was here. It sucked."

"Ah... but I was looking forward to testing that recipe," Naruto heard his wife's rare whining voice and raised an eyebrow at her. "I found the recipe in a cookbook..."

"Look, Hinata, I know your cooking is out of this world, but I don't think even you can salvage that—"

"Is that a challenge?"

Gulping under the intensity of Hinata's lavender stare, which was almost comical given the height difference between the two, he tried to come up with a reply but failed completely.

"You said the same thing about various and various kinds of vegetables before," she reminded him, softening her eyes, "and I proved you wrong every single time. Or... were you lying about them?"

"N-no! No, I like your food even when it's all green!" Naruto swore, shaking his head in denial. He was treading in dangerous territory and he knew it.

"Then let me cook that for you. I promise it will be tasty!"

"Ahh... well, okay," he acquiesced. "You did promise, so you will have cook something yummy!" he warned, remind her of their other shared belief: to never go back on their word.

Satisfied, Hinata smiled and nodded happily. "It will be! But..."

"But...?"

"Well," she began to blush and looked away for a moment, fidgeting. It made Naruto feel nostalgic. "If I just so happen to fail... maybe I could make up for it by serving your... secret favorite dish?"

Hinata then made eye contact with Naruto, and the blond man couldn't help the grin blooming on his face.

Boruto, who was watching the exchange, felt bothered by it. At that moment he saw Hinata's blush intensifying, and though both were sharing a smile... there was something off about them, especially given what his mom had promised...

"Wait. What do you mean by secret?" Himawari questioned from atop Naruto's shoulders, and Boruto jumped at the opportunity to press them further.

"I thought your favorite food was ramen, dad. Is there something you like to eat more than ramen?" For some reason he couldn't understand yet—and oh, he would regret the day he understood why—he wanted to punch his dad's face to wipe that smile off.

The young boy could not remember a time his mother had blushed so hard, and especially not a time where his father had a matching red on his tanner face. "I-It's a secret for a reason, kiddo! Trust me, you guys don't need to know and you don't wanna know..."

Naruto then leaned closer to his wife and whispered: "Don't even think about trying to lose on purpose... the winner gets a reward, after all."

"A-anyways!" Hinata clapped her hands in front of herself, hoping to dispel her thoughts and blush. "I was thinking and... I don't remember Tsunami-san serving that to us during that mission," the older bluenette spoke with a frown, trying to dig up memories of those days before her husband stopped her.

"She didn't; not to you guys," Naruto clarified. "There was some of it as leftovers on that first day. I woke up from a nap hungry and dinner wasn't ready, so she reheated that for me. You know, that day I brought you food cuz you couldn't walk? We even talked for a bit."

"I see..." Hinata trailed off, and eventually giggled. "Come to think of it, that was the first time, wasn't it?"

Naruto stared at his wife's warm smile with slight confusion. "...That I brought you food in bed?"

"No—I mean, that too but... that was the first time we ever had an actual conversation," she reminded him fondly. "I was so happy that I had finally managed to speak to you."

Naruto looked away. "...Well, glad one of us was happy. You just left me completely confused that entire mission, you know. Up until the very end anyways."

The happy, lovestruck expression Hinata had went away when her face flared up and she, too, looked away. "I-I know... ugh."

"Wait, what happened between you two?" Himawari immediately questioned, while her brother just looked straight ahead with feigned disinterest, even though he was listening just as intently.

"You two know your mama sometimes struggles to express herself," Hinata confessed with a self-depreciating smile, her mood dampening. "Back when we were younger it was much worse, especially around your father or grandfather."

"I didn't really get a lot of things back then, like girls, so that didn't help either," Naruto added, also looking out of sorts. _'If only I knew she wanted to be my friend ever since our first meeting...'_

A cloud of depression hung over the two, as they both reflected on their childhood. Their younger years would have been so much more bearable if they had found each other sooner... no, not bearable. They both knew this one connection, so early in their lives, would have made every ounce of pain worth it, and brought nothing but happiness.

A happiness that they had to grow up without...

"...But we are here, you know." Boruto spoke up, making the other three Uzumaki stare at him in confusion and snapping the older two from their regretful thoughts. They annoyed him, and the melancholic aura he felt from his parents particularly pissed him off. "I mean, come on! You two are talking as if you didn't marry and have me and Hima in the end!"

Naruto considered the words and then broke into a grin. "...You know what, son? You are completely on the right!" Hinata yelped, not expecting her husband to hook his arm around her to bring her as close to him. "Nothing in life is perfect... but we got our happy ending, didn't we?"

Reflecting the Naruto's wide smile—the one that was as much of symbol of their little family as the spiral—Hinata mimicked her husband and brought Boruto closer to them with one arm, while wrapping her other limb around her husband and daughter's back as best as she could, given her short arm.

"Hmm... yes, but it could still be closer to perfect"

"Eh, it could?"

Hinata simply stood on her tiptoes and closed her eyes. Grinning at how she still could blush at these situations, Naruto followed her lead.

...Closer, indeed.

* * *

A/N:

I somehow could not bring myself to spell it out for you guys. But everyone knows what happened there, don't you?

Anyways, I hope you guys liked this extra little chapter! Now that I got it off my mind perhaps I can finally proceed with the true Chapter 14 (which will now be 15 because FFdotNet numbers chapters on its own... *sigh*). Coming from the battle scenes of the last chapter, to tests, to MORE battle scenes took a toll on my mind. And my motivation.

This is kinda of a taste of what Part 4's content will be like, in case we all haven't died of old age by then. Not all is sunshine and rainbows between those two, but there's certainly a lot of happiness there—or at least I hope that's what was conveyed.

I also hope you guys enjoyed it! The next chapter... I'm not sure how long it will take. I no longer have a job and luckily will not need to hunt for one in the near future, but I have difficulty with battle sequences, and I can get long-winded with other sections so... well. Let's pray that you all will hear of me again soon enough!

* * *

Guest Review answers:

The two guests that talked about the "silly crush" part: Your reviews deal with the same subject so... well. For the pro-Sasusaku guest, Kakashi was referring to Hinata's feelings when he thought about signs of a silly crush, because he did not understand that Hinata likes Naruto for more reasons beyond the superficial. Hinata also wants his friendship first and foremost. That is something Sakura is achieving as well now that she matured a bit and got glimpses of Sasuke's true nature, but I'd say neither are in real love just yet.

Sakura is still mostly about the superficial 'cool' aspects of Sasuke and lacks enough understanding... while Hinata is still too selfish, given that she knows Naruto would have liked a friend when he was younger and she did nothing, despite wanting to. She'd rather not risk hurting herself despite also seeing personal benefits. She just kept stalking him every once in a while to gather courage the to go on...

I'm also curious why the pro-Naruhina guest (BR guest from last chapter? I mean, between the wording and the "há" with acute accent...) posted two reviews that were close to twins. And at different times. But eh.

Tykronos: Hang in there. It is coming!

Brady: I'm glad you loved it! At least the reception to the arc has been positive despite the length, hasn't it?

Remaining guest: Anonymity makes it hard to properly address you, but thank you very much for the kind words!


	15. Chapter 15 - Shattered, part 2

Hello, people! I need to say a few important things, so listen up.

Firstly... this is rather embarrassing, but it seems like a rather important section of Chapter 12 was somehow deleted during the edition process. Namely, it is what triggers Naruto's epiphany about Hinata wanting to be his friend. Reviewer _Kartikey_ has brought up this issue to me, and I went back and corrected this mistake (and polished that part a little, since I was already there). It's highly recommended that you guys go back and read that little part again after reading this chapter. Use Ctrl+F and search for "lavender flowers" to get near the changed part.

I'm deeply sorry about this oversight... the edition process is quite long and I tend to wrap it up at 3 AM or so after hours of work. I'm really tired by that time, which is why this happened. Though it _has_ been quite a while since that chapter has posted. Was that part _actually_ reasonable for you guys at first? It felt lacking to me now, but oh well.

The second thing that I wanted to talk about is this chapter. It was originally meant to be a 20K chapter like the last one and wrap up the arc, but many unexpected problems at college have slowed me down considerably these past few weeks, and the action sequences didn't come easily to me. As my beta and a few reviewers pointed out that last chapter was too big, I decided to split this second part. Which was already a split part so... welp.

Initially, I'd just post the 11K word chapter I had, but this decision allowed me to elaborate on a couple events some more to make the chapters have _some_ length (lol), though, so it's not all bad news here. The last part will be coming very, very soonish. There will be far less action which means I won't have as many motivation issues/raw difficulty while working on it, and I'm wrapping up college anyways.

The last this is a timeline issue. This chapter _might_ be a little hard to follow due to the multiple battles occurring at once, but I tried to arrange it to the best of my abilities.

Nonetheless, just in case you guys become confused: Parts 1, 2, and 3 happen in that exact order. One ends, and chronologically the following one is beginning at around that moment. These cover the first section of each of the three on-going fights from last chapter, but the second sections are where it gets tricky because it's not a straight timeline anymore.

Parts 4 and 7+ are of the same individual battle, and their events are happening at the same time Parts 5 and 6 are going on. It sounds complicated but it's actually easy to understand while reading due to a major event that affects everyone. You guys will be able to understand what is happening when, but this was just for you to not assume time is flowing directly forward from scene to scene.

There are a lot of things going on in this chapter and much of it is action-based. I hope you guys like it!

* * *

 _Land of Waves arc_

Chapter 15: Shattered, part 2 (Current Version: 1.0)

* * *

"You shouldn't have let me out of your sight, Zabuza."

Kakashi's voice was calm—threateningly so—as he chastised his enemy for his mistake.

Though Zabuza had pumped far more chakra than before into his mist to make it denser, Kakashi's Sharingan was still able to detect movement to a degree. The shuriken that had slashed the swordsman's left bicep to stop his advance on the blissfully ignorant squad of Narutos was a testament to it.

A derisive, angry snort came from a silhouette shrouded in mist, perhaps nine or ten meters apart from the Leaf jonin. "You are right, I shouldn't have bothered going after that obnoxious brat. He might have broken through my other pupil's jutsu, but if he went to rescue the Uchiha then he has basically forfeited his life. They can't beat Haku."

Zabuza's tone was smug. Kakashi knew he was trying to rile him up, to make him worry about his students to become distracted... however, two could play that game. "And yet you still tried to stop Naruto. Worried they might figure something out, Zabuza?"

"Shut up."

As if on cue, the Kubikiribocho cleaved through the space Kakashi had been at, a strong vertical slash followed by a flurry of multi-directional slices as Zabuza bloodthirstily advanced forward. Kakashi did his best to keep up with the swordsman, repelling Zabuza's lightning-fast strikes with a mere pair of kunai, one in each hand. Just as Zabuza was using his superior range to its maximum effect, Kakashi also opted for a patient, defensive fighting style to minimize risk.

With each metallic cling of their frenetic, deadly dance, Kakashi began to identify a pattern. A complex one, but a pattern nonetheless.

Unlike both of their students, Kakashi wasn't innocent enough to believe that patterns were anything else but a trap, and split his focus in two: his body was simply going through the motions as Zabuza wanted; his eyes were scanning all the other directions in expectancy of a feint.

Soon, when a slash towards his torso came, the predicted opposite-direction strike towards his legs didn't.

Zabuza chose the neck as his next target and the thrust as his move. He also missed entirely, and barely saw Kakashi ducking under the blow. That forced the missing-nin to hop backwards, not wanting to give Kakashi a chance to hit him.

But Kakashi had another aim. He shoved his weapons inside the beheading hole carved inside the Kubikirbocho, forcing what was perhaps the most awkward blade lock possible by pushing the Zabuza's blade away from him, almost yanking it off his hands.

Almost. Zabuza recovered his bearings quickly and accompanied the motion, ramming his knee into Kakashi's face as he went. Zabuza smirked, feeling the man's face cave in from the strength behind the attack... until his prey exploded into a small smoke cloud. _'Kage Bunshin!'_

Straining his sensitive hearing while preparing a jutsu, he barely detected the slashing sounds from behind and above him.

"Water Release: Dragon Flower Jutsu!"

Zabuza turned and spat a large barrage of water bullets. They intercepted the quartet of steel stars, and a small grunt of pain later, Zabuza bared his teeth in satisfaction as he ran to pursue his prey.

"Really, Kakashi? You think I'm not aware of my technique's limitations?" he taunted. Zabuza had trained his ears, but that did little to help him if the opponent took to the air. Just the same, the Sharingan's pseudo-clairvoyance did little to help the user if they had nowhere to dodge.

A fact Kakashi was painfully reminded of as he was sent to the ground after taking a water bullet to the stomach. His balance was off due to the imperfect landing, not enough to properly defend against the slash he was sure would be coming a second later, but enough to jump out of the way to try again.

This time, Kakashi had a kunai ready to resist the full weight of Zabuza's greatsword as it came upon him. He could barely see the man himself, let alone get his Sharingan to pierce through the thick mist.

"A nice move, though," the Demon of the Hidden Mist complimented. "Distracting me with a clone and using its explosion to track me down on the mist was clever, I'll give you that much!"

"I'm barely getting started," the silver-haired man countered pushing the heavy blade away and hopping backwards to put some space between them.

Zabuza decided to roll with the idea, concealing himself within the mist to hound his prey once more. "Good. I want to savor my vengeance for as long as possible, and then I'll hunt down those brats of yours and make sure they will see your dead carcass before I deal with them."

A small sigh escaped Kakashi's lips. _'It's been a long time since I faced off against someone this tough... I really shouldn't have taken it easy just because I left the ANBU,'_ he thought with regret.

But he didn't falter. Zabuza's threat was but a reminder of what he was fighting for—the promise he had made in front of the memorial stone, not too soon after he proclaimed that Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura had passed his test. A promise made to himself and to those he had already failed before.

 _"Obito, Rin, Minato-sensei... this time, it will be different. I refuse to let Team 7 fall apart again."_

* * *

"No!"

While the "clangs" that echoed from outside Haku's mirrors hinted of a heated battle with no clear winner, and the loud noises not dissimilar to glass being shattered suggested a change of tides elsewhere... the sound of metal bouncing on the concrete floor of the bridge only spoke tales of defeat and desperation.

At least, that was what Sasuke felt as his weapon was torn away from his hand by expertly aimed needles, one to separate him from the blade and another to launch it a couple meters away from the dome of mirrors. His only consolation was that at least those two hadn't struck his body like the last dozens of senbon, but that did little to improve the boy's mood.

That his opponent—one that Sasuke refused with all his being to admit, but deep down knew was much above his current level—had finally decided to fight seriously and actually disarmed him spoke volumes about where the fight was headed.

He would not have the chance to draw another kunai or execute a technique again.

 _'...So, this is it?'_ he asked himself, shoulders slumping. _'This is as far I can go?'_

And just when he was about to accept the fact that he lost, hope came from the unlikeliest of places.

"Hang on, Sasuke! Don't you dare give up just yet!"

He recognized that voice.

"No... it can't be," he murmured, incredulously following the voice's direction with his eyes. _'What is he even doing here?!'_

Despite the thick mist and his own disbelief, it was impossible not to see a mass of orange approaching the mirrored area. What had been much harder to spot was the gray steel beam the twelve-Naruto squad carried as they rushed at the nearest mirror.

All of Sasuke's hopes were shattered when he realized his friend—friend?—would never make it in time. "No, Naruto! Run!"

His pleas were deafened by the shouts and yells of the orange squad, but the Uchiha has been only barely aware of it. What drew his attention was the sole word that escaped his enemy's lips.

"Foolish."

Sasuke screamed Naruto's name once again as he barely glimpsed a barrage of needles traveling from beyond a mirror to the outside. Instinct alone drove him to race against the rain of senbon, but it was futile. They obliterated the Narutos before he even came close to stepping outside of the mirrors.

A smoke cloud rose in the aftermath of the shadow clones being dispelled, and both Sasuke and Haku were very much surprised to see only the steel beam and needles scattered on the floor, if not stuck on it.

A voice.

"Sasuke, get ready!"

This time the Uzumaki's call came from the other side of the dome of frozen mirrors. Whirling in place, Sasuke now saw Naruto high in the air, and the kunai that Haku had eliminated from the battle flying back towards its rightful owner.

Sasuke was not surprised when, as soon as the kunai passed by the nearest mirror, a hand emerged from the nearest sheet of ice to counter the maneuver with a needle, aimed straight at the blond Uzumaki.

"You have interesting tricks, but if you cannot outspeed me they are useless," Haku stoically informed Naruto right before he caught the thrown kunai and his own needle struck Naruto's body... dispelling him.

Another "poof" and Sasuke fought to suppress laughter as he broke into a mad dash. ' _This guy is unbelievable!'_

There was nothing that Sasuke wanted more than to see the complete surprise in his masked foe's face after the kunai burst into a cloud of smoke, a mere instant before Naruto grabbed the Hyoton-user by his sleeves and threw the older boy towards Sasuke.

"Catch!" Naruto had a broad grin of excitement, and Sasuke was fully sure there was one just like it plastered across his own face.

"Gladly!"

That was the last thing Haku heard before Sasuke's sandaled foot met his masked head once again, almost sending him right back at Naruto with a broken neck.

The blond dove to the ground to launch the strongest punch he could muster and caught the masked ninja's back as they fell, leaving Haku to crash against the bridge's surface—right at the very center of their arena.

"Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu!"

Haku scrambled to roll out of the blaze's path, which came diagonally from the air, and barely managed to rise to his knees in time to block Naruto's incoming fist. The Uzumaki's reaction was to lash out with his legs, but Haku was faster and caught the opposite limb, tripping the orange-clad boy.

Naruto was still able to toss a few shuriken at the masked Ice-user even as he fell on his butt, but Haku had also been able to draw a trio of senbon to defend himself with. Three needles for three throwing stars, and he left himself defenseless as Sasuke entered the fray with his own projectiles: a pair of kunai.

Slippery, Zabuza's pupil still managed to weave between those, only sporting minor gashes and burns on his clothes as the daggers passed by harmlessly.

They collided against one of the mirrors on the edges of the area. He heard sharp noise from the impact against the ice, as well as three soft explosions a foot away from himself—more clones.

Haku molded his chakra and used the Body Flicker Jutsu and practically teleported away from the Narutos, reappearing right beside a mirror far from the two genin.

"No! Stop him!" Haku heard Sasuke's voice, distorting partway through as he entered the ice just like the similar-sounding voices he heard afterwards.

"I'm trying! I'm trying!"

"Eat this!"

"Shut up and let me work, Sasuke!"

"Man, that was so _creepy..._ "

Haku fully melted into his Ice Mirror a single second before dozens of projectiles pelted the reflective surface, bouncing uselessly against the chunk of frozen water and falling to the ground alongside the last two Sasuke had thrown. They exploded, being no more than chakra constructs.

"...I stand corrected." To the genin's surprise, Haku began to applaud them. "While I'm clearly faster, you two almost defeated me with but tactics and teamwork. I'm impressed!"

Despite no longer being in an advantageous position, Naruto and Sasuke's eyes met after they heard their opponent's honest opinion. The Uchiha offered his teammate a small nod and a look of approval and gratitude (with some reluctance—Sasuke figured it wouldn't kill him), prompting Naruto to give him on the widest grins he had ever seen from the boy.

"Not a half-bad plan, idiot," came the backhanded compliment, with the usual smirk.

"Shut up. Next time you need someone to save your ass I'll send Sakura-chan instead," Naruto rebutted with a playful edge, still smiling... especially when Sasuke's eyebrow twitched at the thought. The blond sadly didn't have more than a couple second to enjoy being acknowledged by his strongest rival, as three new memories appeared in his mind, together with a trio of small puffs.

"And yet, your plan has failed," Haku coldly continued, reminding the two boys that they were still on a battlefield. "You caught me off-guard once and I commend you for it, but that won't happen again."

Both Sasuke and Naruto's expressions tightened at the words. They glanced at the sole reflection in the dome and then shared another look.

"Naruto, he's right," the Uchiha muttered in concession. "Now that he got inside his mirror again... we're back to square one."

"You got that wrong, Sasuke," Naruto grinned, pointing at himself. "Now we have the numbers going for us."

"One more person won't make much of a difference," Sasuke countered immediately, but he saw the mistake in his mindset after a second of thought.

"Maybe not one... but how about one hundred?!"

Naruto moved his pointer and middle fingers to a cross-like formation: the seal associated with his favorite jutsu.

Sasuke was just about to yell at Naruto for using a technique so openly, but stopped himself. They were lucky that, despite Haku's insane speed, he still needed to "split" his reflection between the mirrors, which took a few, precious seconds.

"Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

Sasuke suddenly found himself in the middle of one of his worst nightmares. No matter which direction he looked at, there were dozens and dozens of Narutos all around him, almost as if he were drowning in a sea of orange.

Luckily, they were on his side instead of against him unlike that one dream...

"Come on, let's leave this dump!" the one who Sasuke knew was the original yelled at him, making himself be heard amidst his clones own screams as the copies advanced. Some tried to escape, while others chose to attack the mirrors.

"Interesting."

The furious shouts and battle cries soon became pained groans.

Almost as fast as they popped into existence, the chakra constructs were reduced to nothing but mere smoke, making the battlefield even hazier than it was before. Needles littered the area inside the cage of ice, and Sasuke was quick to notice that there were far fewer needles than there had been clones.

"Argh," Naruto angrily tore a needle that struck shoulder and tossed it aside. "That's ridiculous! I didn't see anything! How does he do that?!"

"That's the problem... he's too fast," Sasuke snarled, clutching his newly drawn kunai tightly. He wanted to ask if Naruto had a better plan, but his pride kept him from admitting he was lost—not in front of Naruto of all people.

"Exactly," Haku agreed with the genin, still hoping they might stop insisting in a hopeless fight. "You can continue to struggle, but it will be useless."

"Shut up! I'll show you...!" Angered, Naruto tried the exact same trick again.

That Haku allowed him also angered Sasuke once again, who once again thought he was underestimating them... but in truth, Haku just realized that Naruto had just used a very taxing technique and let the rowdy genin wear himself out. The Ice-user just took it all as a training exercise to hone his skills (he had actually barely managed to destroy every clone before some escaped), all while racking his mind for new theories on how to awaken his enemy's dojutsu.

 _'Now that his teammate—Naruto, I believe—entered the fray... I wonder if I can't use this to accomplish my mission somehow...'_

And while Haku flashed between the mirrors, destroying multiple clones as he tossed needles everywhere, Sasuke observed, deep in thought.

 _'Naruto is not directly helping but with so many clones around... maybe I'll be able to glean something from watching this. He does a good job at being the bait... hm.'_

Sasuke filed this realization for later use, and immediately scowled. There wouldn't be a "later" unless they defeated Haku, and Naruto's technique had been proving as useful as it had before. At best, it had just slightly tired out their opponent.

 _'If only my eyes were fast enough to track him...!'_

In his fury, Sasuke did the only thing that could help him. It was a long shot, but he was aware that focusing chakra in a part of the body made that specific area stronger and more resilient. For sensorial organs such as the tongue or skin, however, the senses were sharpened at the expense of a bigger chakra cost, and thus, Sasuke sent chakra towards his eyes.

He wasn't expecting anything to happen. It was a well-known fact that trying to enhance your eyesight with chakra only made you see slightly farther and slightly clearer, and neither of those boosts would actually help with anything... but he did it anyways, out of desperation. A last resort he was sure wouldn't amount to anything, even though he had never tried to do it before.

And that was when the tides began to change.

* * *

 _'This is going nowhere!'_

Hinata had to hand it to her opponent. While not a single one of the abilities the green-robed masked girl had displayed was particularly threatening on their own, when all of them were put together the masked girl became a particularly annoying opponent to face. Feeling that mid-battle was a first for Hinata, who tended to respond to fights with completely different negative emotions, such as fear or hesitation.

The frozen and liquid water that covered the surface of the battlefield still was bothersome, keeping Hinata, Kiba, and Akamaru away from the fight for far too long each time Haru landed a stronger blow and forced them to slide away. That was exactly the fate that had befallen the blue-haired Hyuuga at that moment, leaving her out of the fight for far, far too much time in her opinion.

Luckily—despite how that brought some concerns on its own right—Naruto's timely and surprising intervention got rid of the blockade that made circling around the Ice-user all but impossible. That, at least, made her staff far easier to handle... but in place of the bigger barrier the Uzumaki broke through, the masked girl now shot smaller barriers that repelled Hinata and Kiba's projectiles while serving as another attack to be dodged. Given that they traveled quickly through the air and were just as big as the mirrors Sasuke was dealing with, only significantly thinner, that was easier said than done.

Hinata had made the mistake of trying to strike one such "mini-barrier", as she dubbed it in her mind, but destroying it came at the cost of her entire hand being encased in ice. It was only a thin layer covering the skin of the hand, but Hinata could see it sapping her of her chakra and becoming thicker before she got rid of it.

Thus, the trio was forced to avoid the projectiles entirely or waste time crashing their kunai into it to break through safely, giving Haru even more openings to knock them away.

Which is exactly how Hinata found herself in her current position.

And that wasn't even the worst part: each time one of the three actually managed to land a blow, it turned out the armor-like coat of ice the girl wore beneath her robes protected her from being harmed by it. Kiba was sure his drilling techniques could get through but had yet to find an opening to execute the attack now that Haru was taking them more seriously. Hinata's Gentle Fist strikes were proving completely useless, however.

 _'What use is being able to hit her when nothing damages her?! At this rate...'_ she gulped, watching Kiba and Akamaru's fast-paced struggle to break through the enemy's defenses. Claws were avoided, slashes were parried, openings were scarce... and those didn't lead to anywhere, even when they did land a hit

It wasn't just annoying to Hinata. It was worrisome.

Her partners were much faster with the Four Legs Technique, but they couldn't have it active forever. It was draining them, while as far as the Byakugan could perceive only the girl's eventual mini-mirrors actually put a dent on her modest chakra reserves. Haru had almost completed an unknown jutsu on two occasions, and Hinata didn't want to find out what technique she had in mind for them.

Still, Hinata had to face reality.

 _'I... I can't contribute much here. My techniques aren't working and I can barely keep up with their speed...'_

That old and well-known feeling of failure was just as haunting as ever, but she could avoid it if only she could think of a plan to tip the scales to their side.

 _'No technique is perfect,'_ she tried to calm herself down and push the self-depreciation away. _'I just need to figure out a weakness. Where can I start?'_

"Ice Release: Ice Flow Spear!"

"She managed to do a jutsu?" Hinata hurriedly focused again into watching the fight. She looked back just as a thick arrow of solid ice sprouted from the wet surface of the bridge, right in front of Haru's feet, and flew towards one of her friends. She had no idea if it was Kiba or the disguised Akamaru who was targeted until the almost-skewered boy cursed loudly.

"Dammit... so you know offensive jutsu after all," he growled, eyes narrowed.

"Of course I do," she scoffed. "Ice is a primarily defensive element, but as you can see..."

 _'Wait, what was that?'_ Hinata felt as if something of importance was said. _'Ice... element? Elements. Elements...!'_

Her mind replayed a memory of almost five days before, of when she had asked a question about the First Hokage's Wood Release in the middle of Kakashi's lesson about elements.

 _"...But elements such as those are very much like your Byakugan: bloodline limits. The basic elements can be learned by anyone that puts in enough time and hard work, but there are other elements that combine two kinds of elemental chakra..."_

 _'That's it! Kakashi-sensei spoke about each element's weaknesses and strengths... maybe there's something that can help me. Okay.'_ She took a deep breath to calm her mind, hoping that Haru didn't notice she was up to no good. Hinata just knew she was on to something.

 _'Ice isn't one of the basic five elements, which means it's some kind of fusion between two other elements. But which ones?'_

Another few seconds spent thinking. _'Part of it must be Water, obviously. I know Water and Earth somehow results in Wood,'_ she remembered having asked that question to Kakashi midway through their training session. _'Fire and Lighting produce heat so they probably aren't the answer. That just leaves Wind.'_

Could that be the answer?

 _'Wind... there's some logic to it, what with wind being able to cool things. So let's go with that theory. Wind is weak to Fire, but Water is strong against it and it's not like Sasuke is here anyways. But... Water's weaknesses are Lighting and Earth and we have nobody that can use any of those!'_ she finished her thoughts with rising panic and irritation, almost groaning in defeat.

Then the girl blinked and thought about it a little more. Though Kurenai and Kakashi weren't available, was it really true that they had no one that could use Earth Release?

"Kiba-kun, I'll be right ba— _aie!_ "

"What?" both the Inuzuka and the enemy ninja exclaimed, startled by the high-pitched yelp, but Hinata was already too far away to be seen within the mist.

...A good thing for the girl's tarnished honor, as she knew no one saw her slipping on a puddle and crashing face-first into the bridge's frozen floor. Blushing, the girl scrambled to get up, almost fell again, but managed to run towards her destination.

"Sakura-san, Shino-kun!"

"Hinata...?" The pinkette blinked until her friend's silhouette became clearer. "Hey, look! It's Hinata!"

"You alright, girlie?" Tazuna asked warily, eyeing the bleeding wound on the girl's head and noting how the blood was tangling up her blue locks, near her left temple.

"I-I'm managing," she said, slightly out of breath. Her nose, head and chest were still throbbing dully and she had a few other scratches, but nothing life threatening.

"Do you require any assistance, Hinata?" Shino inquired, as stoic as ever. There was no other logical reason for the girl to return alone, after all, and her wellbeing had already been assessed.

She nodded. "I-I do, as a matter of fact."

The Hyuuga then explained the fight's circumstances and her own theory as briefly and with as much composure as she could.

Shino and Sakura shared an unsure look, and the Aburame faced his teammate. "That was an interesting theory. It does make sense, but I frankly do not see how we can be of help."

"Hinata... we didn't complete our training," Sakura added, unsure. "You know this. Even if we go out there to fight..."

"You two don't need to go out there and fight." Surprisingly, it was Tazuna who decided to add his two cents. "Maybe a dagger might be what they need to cut that armor she was talkin' about. You two can do that much, can't you? I mean, your teacher did benches out of earth back at the forest, remember?"

Again, Sakura and Shino shared a look, and the pinkette spoke up. "I think we can make something small like a kunai..."

"Absolutely." Immediately, the Aburame crouched and started to focus his chakra into the bridge, prompting Sakura to do the same. Hinata saw Tazuna looking at how Shino began to mold the Earth from concrete with interest, and she too focused on it with her Byakugan.

 _'...It really isn't that different from my own training,'_ she eventually concluded. As far as her eyes could tell, the only major difference was that Shino needed to form a specific shape before moving what he was manipulating. That was much easier said than done, given that she knew he had superior chakra control to herself and yet his chakra struggled to go through the floor of the bridge the way the Aburame wanted.

"Achoo! Aw, dam—achoo!"

Hinata deactivated her dojutsu and turned to Sakura "Bless y—oh."

"Thanks... huh?" Sakura stared at Hinata inquisitively. The Hyuuga's face was almost as red as a tomato, and she was looking towards Sakura's lap. The pinkette soon followed her friend's eyes and...

"Oh."

Sakura was very sure her face wasn't far from the shade of her own dress, or Hinata's face for that matter.

The two sneezes had broken her concentration while manipulating the Earth Chakra, and the result... was quickly tossed away by Sakura, disappearing into the mist and—the girls desperately hoped—eventually sinking into the ocean surrounding the bridge, never to be seen again.

"I-I-I'm sorry, Hinata! I didn't mean to make—"

"I-I know!"

"...What's wrong with you two?" Tazuna inquired as he turned around, gazing at them with suspicion.

"Nope! Nothing at all! I swear I'm not some kind of pervert!"

"Sakura-san!"

"Er... I mean—!"

"Forget I asked. I don't want to know."

The old bridge builder turned away from the girls just in time to see Shino examining a jagged, slightly bent dagger made of the Earth chakra from the concrete, while Sakura was silently contemplating suicide behind Hinata.

"Perhaps we should've tried a small hammer, or a pick axe...?" the bug-user wondered idly.

"N-no!" Hinata quickly took the kunai from Shino; she was a little too rattled to remember her manners. "This will do!"

Or at least, it was her hope.

"Um... I'll try making one again," Sakura spoke up timidly from behind them. "Can you do another yourself, Shino? This way there will be three weapons for three people... er, two and a dog; whatever!"

Not waiting for an answer, the flustered girl crouched to try again, and Shino silently did as he was asked to.

Soon, Hinata had in her hands three weapons made of stone. The one Sakura made resembled a kunai's shape more than Shino's, but the "blade" was a little thinner than a normal kunai. The second one Shino had made wasn't too different from the first, except the center of the weapon was a somewhat thicker.

"Do you require us to go with you?" Shino queried once he was done, using a finger to push his sunglasses back to their place.

Hinata didn't want to endanger her friends, however. "No... please stay here guarding Tazuna-san. I-I think we can manage from here."

"You sure?" Sakura looked for confirmation and got it when Hinata nodded.

"Uh... I need to go back now," the bluenette awkwardly reminded them.

"Then please, be careful. And pass this reminder to Kiba as well, if you are able."

Those were Shino's parting words to her, and Hinata took off soon afterwards, until her friends and client could no longer see her from within the mist.

Hinata was smarter this time around—she didn't run as fast as she could, both to conserve energy and to minimize the risk of tripping. As such, she wasn't out of breath or with her face on the floor when she arrived at the lightly frozen portion of the bridge.

Byakugan flaring, she immediately noticed that abandoning her teammate almost brought a disaster. Akamaru was on the floor away from where Kiba and Haru were dueling, no longer in his transformed human state but in his original canine form, knocked out. His owner was valiantly standing his ground between his wounded partner and the enemy, who now had switched back to the greatsword-like grip she had initially started with.

As she moved, Hinata used her vision to briefly examine the puppy and to her relief, he didn't appear to be wounded... but patches of his fur were glowing slightly, hinting at the Ice Barrier that had rendered the dog unconscious.

His master, though, only was fine on the outside. You wouldn't know just by looking at him, but his cracked ribs could not hide from Hinata's eyes, and while she could have been mistaken, his left shoulder looked misaligned. _'Could that have been from being disarmed?'_ the Byakugan-user wondered, noting his lack of kunai in hand.

Despite Kiba having his back partially turned towards her, Hinata couldn't hide from his nose either.

"It's about time you showed up, Hinata!" A pause, as he weaved by a two-handed swing from Haru. "What took you so long?!" he managed to ask through gritted teeth.

"S-sorry, Kiba-kun! I-I got help!"

Hinata's words made Haru shift her focus to the Hyuuga, a mistake that earned her a hard kick to the stomach. The layer of ice over her skin stove off some of the damage, but momentum still had her sliding a little along the floor.

"Here!"

The Yuki girl caught a glimpse of something brown being tossed from one genin to the other, but she didn't wait to see what it was. Quickly regaining her balance, she swung her staff at Kiba's hand, hoping to possibly knock away the unknown object.

The Inuzuka's reaction was good enough that their weapons clashed against each other, making both ninja recoil from the impact. Instead of the sharp sounds kunai and ice had been making for quite some time already, this time the sound resembled broken glass.

"No... no, not again!"

Haru paled, watching as bits of frozen water flaked off the cracked, broken tip of her staff.

"Ohohoho... a new toy! I like it! Hinata, where did you get this?" Kiba asked with mirth, eyes still trained on his opponent.

Only one word that could describe the Inuzuka's expression perfectly: predatory.

"I asked Shino-kun and Sakura-san to make them for me," she displayed her own stone kunai. Kiba didn't see it, but he got the hint.

While Haru was still in too much shock and disbelief to move, Kiba took a chance to relax. "Hinata, you're an angel! You said you liked cinnamon rolls, didn't you?"

"Uh, yes?" Hinata was mildly confused but her stomach was liking where this was going.

"When we get back home, I'm buying you as much as you can eat! Look forward to it!" he laughed carefreely. Having the advantage, for once, was a nice feeling indeed.

 _'Oh, Kiba-kun...'_ the meek, gentle Hyuuga girl smiled with an edge of smugness that rarely, if ever, crossed her features. _'You have no idea how much you are going to regret those words.'_

* * *

With a couple of Itachi-related exceptions aside... Sasuke had never felt so much fury in his heart. The mere idea was outrageous! It made him sick with anger.

He still didn't remember anything about the event itself outside of the death of his parents—which wasn't even a fully accurate memory thanks to his brother's genjutsu—but he should've known! It was so ridiculously obvious!

If the Sharingan was to be unlocked by a traumatic event... what could possibly be more traumatic than what he had gone through on that fateful night? Of course his clan's massacre by the hands of his own brother would have triggered it! If that was not enough, nothing else would be.

So much time _wasted_.

There was simply no other explanation for what happened to his vision after he tried to enhance his eyes. Sasuke now, effortlessly, could track down Haku's movements. Be it how he transferred from mirror to mirror or how the Yuki's motions now gave away the exact path his needles would travel... almost as if time itself had slowed down just for his sake, the black-haired boy now could finally keep up with his opponent's movements.

All because of his clan's dojutsu: the Sharingan. Black gave way to a deep red, and the only remains of Sasuke's natural eye color were in the tomoe that surrounded his pupil. One on the left eye and two on the right, with a thin circle of a darker shade of red that passed through each swirl-like shape.

That he now could finally use that which made the Uchiha a superior breed among other ninja was excellent... but nothing ever goes perfectly.

"Come on, you idiot! Get up already!" He yelled at the fallen Naruto, who was curled up on the ground and full of needles and scratches everywhere. The blond only didn't have more of them because the attacks had driven him to unconsciousness earlier.

It forced Sasuke to work on blocking some needles that he could have otherwise dodged if that didn't mean they would hit Naruto instead. All that exercise, as well as his use of the Sharingan, was taking a toll on Sasuke. He wouldn't be able to keep up for long, especially with Naruto down.

"Don't faint on me again! I can't keep protecting you like this...!"

"Gnh... and who asked you to?!" The Uzumaki grumbled, also angry as he slowly tried to rise. With the fight going as badly as it was, emotions ran high, and both genin defaulted to the usual array of negative emotions they felt towards each other when not purposefully trying to bond for the team's sake. That idea had been thrown out of the window alongside those needles a while ago already.

It didn't help Naruto's mood that, suddenly, the genius genin found a way to fight back against their enemy while he had accomplished _nothing_. His ambush had failed, and he couldn't handle Haku's velocity no matter how many clones he created to patch up said weakness. While Sasuke wasn't exactly unscathed, he at least hadn't been hit on important, debilitating pressure points. Naruto could barely move without his body vehemently protesting against it.

But Sasuke could fight. Somehow, he could keep up... and once again, Naruto saw the Uchiha heir walking ahead, leaving him to eat his dust.

Would he ever catch up? Was he somehow _destined_ to forever be such a loser?

...And while the Leaf boys were trying to deal with their emotions mid-fight, Haku also found himself with problems of his own.

 _'I can't hit him!'_

No matter how fast he went, Sasuke's scarlet eyes followed his every movement. His every attack.

Ever since the boy had actually understood that his opponent had activated his Sharingan—Haku still had no idea how _that_ happened—they found themselves in a stalemate. The only way out would be for Haku to resort to his more dangerous techniques. Those that were meant for murdering, instead of incapacitation.

 _'No... no, not yet. Not until I'm certain there's no other option! There must be another way...'_

Initially, Haku was just trying to circle around the battlefield, to strike at Sasuke's blind spots... but the warning Zabuza had given to him before they left their hideout had proven to be true.

 _"Once, or if, you manage to awaken the boy's dojutsu, finish the fight as soon as you can. He WILL find out the secret behind your technique before long, and there is a chance he could beat you if he does."_

Haku had arrogantly dismissed his master's wisdom, especially after seeing how helpless the boy became after he got trapped inside his dome of mirrors. His level of raw speed when inside his mirrors was not something the average genin or chunin could hope to match.

Alas, that dismissal could bring his downfall, he now realized.

Contrary to Naruto's self-depreciative thoughts, Haku was becoming tired. His jutsu took a toll on his reserves, and his stamina wasn't truly up to the task of keeping the offensive up for so long and against so many clones... not to mention he was running out of needles. Taking multiple clones out with a single shot was a game at first but it soon became a necessity for the masked boy.

And now the situation had changed so drastically, that it was he the one that couldn't get past his enemy's guard.

Hearing more of that sharp sound his needles made every time they uselessly bounced off Sasuke's kunai, Haku racked his brain for a solution, until his gaze fell on Naruto. _'Yes... that could work.'_

Reading more needles, Haku let them fly from within the mirror, before following them himself while drawing some more.

From the instant the senbon left the Ice structure, Sasuke knew they never were aimed at him. His brain quickly interpreted the trajectory his eyes were now able to detect, and what he saw scared him to his very core.

"Naruto!"

"Huh?" Hearing his name, the Uzumaki tensed and by sheer coincidence, he saw the glint of light reflecting off the metal needles aimed straight at him. Just when he understood exactly what would happen in the following second, his eyes widened and then immediately closed.

He heard a scuffle. The familiar sound of needles piercing air—it was a different noise than that of kunai and shuriken, he now noticed—and some grunts. A particularly impactful noise caught his attention, given that a pained moan that was not Sasuke's came at the same moment as something fell to the floor. Then silence.

It could only have meant one thing.

Naruto opened his eyes. His sight was at ground level and he immediately noticed the fallen form of the masked boy. There was a distinctive "scar" on the mask he wore, and he wasn't moving.

"No way... you actually did it!" A smile bloomed on Naruto's face. "You won, Sasuke! How did... you..."

All the happiness the Uzumaki felt when he was assured of victory was gone as he paid attention to his friend, who had his back turned away from him, facing Haku.

Sasuke had been right beside him, and peripherally Naruto had been aware of it. But it was only when he paid more attention to the red-and-white fan, surrounded by blue, that the saw many, many red dots in places where they didn't belong. That's not how his teammate's back usually looked like.

"Heh... that's right. I won..." Sasuke partially turned, to glance at Naruto. It was horribly out of place, but he couldn't help but chuckle. "You should see the look on your face..."

Naruto normally would have insulted him right back, if not for the many, many needles he saw jutting out of Sasuke's torso. His arms, his legs, his stomach... his chest...!

"You look... dumb," his Sharingan flickered out, "d-dumber than usual...!"

"You bastard, this isn't funny!" Sasuke started wobbling, and Naruto forced himself up to catch him.

Sasuke had this dazed look on his face that worried Naruto beyond what words could describe.

He tried to shake the Uchiha, but he didn't seem to be getting any better.

"Heh... to think, I'd go out like this... protecting you."

Something inside Naruto was starting to snap, just as his tears were starting to fall. His teammate's words were the harsh reality that he was doing everything in his power to deny.

Sasuke was dying.

"Why did you do that...?! I didn't... I didn't ask you to help! T-to do this..."

The words "for me" were lost in a choke. Naruto's throat locked up and refused to budge... and at the same time, a few meters away, Haku began to awaken.

While the Yuki started to regain his bearings, Sasuke found himself without a true answer to give to his friend.

 _'...Friend, is it?'_

"Hey, come on! If you close your eyes I swear I'll—!"

"You know... I... used to hate you," Sasuke coughed a confession. And blood, falling as a thick red stream from the boy's mouth, just as there were two clear, colorless one cascading from Naruto's eyes.

The memories they shared replayed on the Uchiha's mind. From a couple chance meetings before they even began to attend the academy, years ago... to when both began to argue over who had completed the Tree Climbing exercise first just 24 hours prior.

To Sasuke, it all was starting to make sense. To Naruto, it was all becoming even more of a mess.

"Then why?! _Why did you do it?!_ "

"Because... you p-promised..."

It took a moment for Naruto to grasp what Sasuke was talking about, but soon, he remembered. The day before the mission, in the usual training grounds...

 _"It will take a while for me to catch up to you, but I will be there when you finally get the chance to avenge your clan!"_

"You never go back on your word... huh? T-then... then I can't let you break that promise."

It was silly, they both knew it. The promise would indirectly be broken anyways by Sasuke's absence... but what else could he even say to Naruto? His body had simply moved on its own, driven by pure instinct instead of cold logic.

And just like instinct and logic both were failing him now, Sasuke's legs gave out and Naruto almost fell with him, only barely managing to kneel and steady his teammate.

It was becoming harder to breathe, the Uchiha noticed. And he also couldn't help but note the irony, of how acquiring enhanced eyesight ultimately led to his eyes failing him. He could not even spot his reflection on the top-most mirror of Haku's dome. Just a blur.

Whatever it actually was, his mind completed the hazy image, turning it into a mirage of his brother. It and the fully matured pair of Sharingan he wore glared at him. The mirage was quickly disappearing... but Sasuke still tried to reach out to him with his needle-struck arm. He wouldn't be able to grasp it, just as he would never be able to achieve his dreams.

"I spent... my whole life trying to become stronger. So that I could kill my brother to... to avenge my clan. I... failed."

His arm dropped, and his head turned to face Naruto. Sasuke had never, ever imagined he'd be dying in Naruto's arms, let alone that he'd end up giving his own life to save the most annoying person he had ever had the displeasure of interacting with.

"Dammit, d-don't say stuff like that!"

He had thought it impossible that Naruto would be _crying_ for him as he died... if that was Naruto's reaction, how badly would Sakura take it? The only thing Sasuke could do was hope that they'd be able to survive.

The urge to close his eyes was getting stronger and stronger.

Sasuke could not deny it any longer.

"Na... Naruto. Don't let your dreams... fade away."

His eyes closed.

"Hey, Sasuke! Dammit, Sasuke!"

"..."

"Sasuke, this isn't funny!" Naruto started to shake his friend more violently. " _Wake up!_ "

Naruto was screaming his name as loud he could, but even that felt so far away. A seas of black numbed all of Sasuke's senses.

 _'Mother... Father... I'm sorry. I couldn't stop him. Please... forgive me.'_

The darkness drowned him.

* * *

The sounds of metal on metal were becoming louder and louder.

Zabuza held a lot of pride in being part of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist, but he saw no other option but to give up on using his gigantic blade, and swapped it for a curve-pointed kunai. His duel with Kakashi was meant to help him measure his own strength for the sake of an eventual fight against Yagura... but the Mizukage wasn't a close-combat specialist. He could certainly give trouble to many jonin with his staff alone, but he'd ultimately fall back on ninjutsu.

Kakashi was different. He was much better at using plain weapons than Yagura, and Zabuza felt that his sword's weight was becoming a burden in this specific fight. The kunai was much lighter, allowing him to swing faster and without compromising his position as much.

It did mean he had to come closer to his enemy, but the fight was becoming more and more to his favor, as Kakashi could attest to.

More vicious slashes came at Kakashi, and his Sharingan barely allowed him to block the blows at the last instant. _'He truly is a demon...! He is not as fast as Guy when we spar, and definitely nowhere as fast as Sensei was... but this mist! I almost can't react to his attacks because of this blasted thing!'_

Kakashi was considering a plan that involved allowing Zabuza to hit him, but not only the chakra cost made him wary of going through with it, the level of strength the rogue jonin displayed made him unwilling to risk himself by giving such a free opening. He had been struggling to handle the weight of the Kubikiribocho before, but the extra speed Zabuza was pumping into his strikes more than made up the difference.

So much that the choice was eventually taken out of Kakashi's hands.

"Well, well... would you look at this?" The Demon's laugh echoed throughout the mist. "As they say, if it bleeds, it can be killed. But congratulations, Kakashi! I can count on a single hand the number of people I've actually needed more than one strike to kill."

The silver-haired jonin just narrowed his eyes. The heavy layer of protection his flak jacket offered had been of little use to protect his shoulder, but at least it allowed him to recover fast enough to kick Zabuza away.

"Is that so? I made you bleed before as well, if you'd remember... and this time, you won't have someone to help you."

"Hmph... I won't need my tools this time," the assassin growled. But just as Zabuza was about to move and make true to that promise, a wave of killing intent of the likes he had never felt before made itself known to him. It was almost... inhuman.

 _'What... what is this?! Is this Kakashi's doing?'_ Even he, an accomplished and experienced jonin, started to feel anxious.

 _'This aura... it's not just the will to kill someone. No, it can't be Kakashi. I can feel... hatred? And... it's coming from where Haku is,'_ he realized with a scowl. He was far from a sensor-type ninja, but if even a "normal" ninja could pinpoint with precision from where that twisted radiance was coming from... it made him wonder just what kind of mess his pupil had gotten himself into.

 _'The last time I felt this kind of abominable chakra was... Yagura!'_

But while Zabuza had only an inkling of an idea of what was happening, Kakashi understood it immediately. He had felt this same wave of pure, raw hatred before. It was much duller, "lighter" in a way, than what he had felt during that incident from over a decade before, but how could he forget it?

And even he had somehow forgotten... the bright orange glow that Obito's eye detected was unmistakable.

 _'The Kyuubi... this is the Kyuubi's chakra!'_ The mere thought almost drove him to a state of panic. _'Something is happening to Naruto! Argh... could this incident become any more complicated?!_ '

Nonetheless, despite the traumatic memories he associated with that oppressive chakra, he managed to focus. _'Zabuza has to be distracted right now... I need to think of something and fast! ...Huh?'_

The Sharingan's ability to perceive the flow of chakra was something he rarely made use of, but this time...

 _'...I see. The Kyuubi's chakra is pushing away the chakra-based mist from the area Naruto is, and that is making the mist move around.'_ It was subtle, and the normal eye would be unable to catch it, but Kakashi could clearly see the mist shifting to accommodate the dense chakra Naruto was leaking.

It made Kakashi finally realize the true weakness of Zabuza's jutsu. He didn't even get angry at himself for not realizing sooner as a more hot-blooded person would: he simply acted, going through the seals of a jutsu that had an eerily appropriate name for the situation he was in.

"Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!"

"What...?! No!" Cursing eloquently at both his opponent and himself, Zabuza scrambled to dodge the sharp wind blast. He managed to come out of it unharmed, but the floor of the bridge became littered with cuts from the sharp Wind chakra.

That he was able to see the damage, however, was cause for concern.

"You bastard..." he turned to glare daggers at Kakashi, taking care to not actually look into the Leaf jonin's left eye now that the mist had dispersed. "You know Fuuton?!"

"Well, I _am_ famous for knowing over a thousand jutsu... but you still seem rather surprised, Zabuza," the Copy Ninja noted jovially, mostly to annoy his opponent. _'Could it be that not even he knew of this weakness? Hmm... Zabuza is not the type to get into real fights, and with the element being rather rare...'_

His thoughts were halted by a bark of laughter.

"I guess in the end this is a good thing," Zabuza smirked beneath his mask as the mist around them both began to dissipate. He only kept enough around them to hinder others from interfering. "I can go all out without any fears!"

Contrary to his words, the swordsman's first action was to throw his kunai at Kakashi, who blocked it without any effort, but that was just something to keep the silver-haired man busy so that

Zabuza could grab the Kubikirbocho again.

Kakashi was just barely able to see the process that Hinata had failed to witness the first time around because of the mob of Narutos that at the time had surrounded the Mist jonin.

Though the Sharingan did not see Zabuza sending a large portion of his chakra into his blade, it did perceive a seal on the flat of the blade activating. The seal flooded the sword with chakra, which was sent right back to Zabuza in an explosion of purple, raw energy and killing intent that engulfed the man completely, taking the form of what Kakashi could only describe as a demon.

 _'...A shroud technique, of all things.'_ He now understood what Hinata's confusing report after their first battle had been about. _'Could this day get any worse?'_

Jutsu that covered the user's body with a thick layer of raw chakra were commonly referred to as shrouds. These techniques always gave the person some sort of protective enhancement, and some like the Lighting Chakra Armor that Kumo's Raikage were famous for even went as far as increasing power and speed of the user. The complex execution and the raw amount of chakra needed to sustain such techniques made shrouds extremely rare in the ninja world.

Kakashi didn't know how much it increased Zabuza's abilities, but he wasn't looking forward to finding it out. _'At least it's going to be much easier to track him down,'_ he figured. Though dwarfed by the Kyuubi's, the demonic shroud seemed to intensify the killing intent Zabuza was leaking, which clashed with the stealthy nature of the Kirigakure no Jutsu.

"Most ninja think that my sword's only special ability is to recompose itself when in contact with the chakra of a person's blood," Zabuza began. "But the truth is, few have ever pushed its wielders into releasing its true powers. You should feel honored, Kakashi. You are only the third person to have ever faced me like this."

Momentarily, the assassin was reminded of the two people that had ever wiped out the floor with him in combat even after he was forced to use his blade's powers. Kisame Hoshikage, fellow member of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist... and Yagura, the Fourth Mizukage. Of course, there were also some of the Konoha genin he fought, but that incident hardly counted to him.

Meanwhile, upon a second of thought, Kakashi quickly realized one of the shroud's functions. _'This chaotic layer of chakra disrupts genjutsu... he wouldn't have dispelled the mist otherwise. It looks dangerous to touch as well... I suppose it's a good thing I didn't go through with my plan of summoning dogs to hunt him down.'_

Zabuza then re-entered his fighting stance. "This kind of brute-power combat is not my style, but just as you showed me why you are called the Copy Ninja, Kakashi of the Sharingan... so allow me demonstrate why I earned my name as the Demon of the Hidden Mist!"

* * *

Hinata could feel that the end of her fight was coming.

Both she and Kiba had begun to press their newfound advantage and, finally, their foe was on the defensive. Not because of a stalling tactic, but because she _couldn't_ go on the offensive.

The masked girl's weapons broke easily as did her barrier-projectiles. Hinata didn't understand what exactly happened when they clashed with the Earth daggers that made them succeed where raw metal failed, but she wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth... while she still had the energy to, anyways.

 _'Is my stamina really this low,'_ she wondered as she broke through another small Ice mirror,panting, _'or are those two just that much better than me in that area?'_

Despite Haru's frequent use of jutsu or raw nature manipulation and Kiba's constantly activated Four-Legs Technique, they were nowhere as drained as Hinata was. Or at least that was the impression Hinata had of the two.

In spite of that and her own distaste for it, the Hyuuga girl was feeling an odd satisfaction from the fight. With the enemy's defenses no longer working as well as they were, she was able to actually press the masked girl into the defensive, while taking an offensive behavior instead. It made her feel like she was progressing, even though she knew Kiba's help had been necessary for that.

Said Inuzuka, though also pleased with the fight mostly because he loved fighting, was finding it hard to keep his head in the game. The flow of combat drove the trio to take their fight away from Akamaru, so without the dog's safety in mind he ended up noticing an interesting tidbit about their enemy.

He has felt her scent before. It was slightly different because of the lack of Ice coating her skin, but her smell was one he knew. From where, though, was the question that eluded him, coming close to distracting him but not quite.

Haru, for her part, was starting to panic. The layer of chakra-enhanced frozen water on her skin was cracked everywhere and in many parts broken, leaving the dull purple of bruises or the dark crimson of cuts in their places. All of her techniques either were easily countered by the stone weapons her foes carried, or took far too long to execute. She had barely managed to use her Ice Flow Spear Jutsu at two points, but missed entirely due to hastiness. At least, the Yuki thought, she was still able to bring water from nearby to coat the battlefield in Ice...

And while she still could create staves fast enough to retain some sort of range, they were far too easily destroyed during clashes. A single good hit wasn't enough to fully break the weapon, but it didn't amount to much afterwards. But she couldn't let those two through, and with her master's words resounding on her mind, she kept on fighting

 _"Your job will be to stop the other genin from interfering. The Inuzuka has the speed and the techniques to overpower your brother's jutsu, and I'd rather not find out if the Hyuuga's taijutsu can destabilize his mirrors or kill if he is inside. The other two are of no consequence but keep them away just the same."_

Unlike herself, Haku had never managed to produce the chakra-draining effects of the Hyoton—Zabuza had a theory about his chakra being more attuned to Wind than Water if she remembered right—so Haru had to keep the two away from her brother, especially the Inuzuka. As Zabuza desired the two genin for his own purposes, she had also to keep them alive.

Not that she could kill them, as things were. Her only plan had been to use the dog as a hostage and work from there, but the fallen Akamaru was around the middle of the bridge. If Haru's memory was right, their fight was taking place near the lateral edges of the bridge, and her lack of a plan was making the Yuki girl nervous...

Nervous enough to actually stumble on her own slippery ice, after avoiding a low sweep by Kiba, which Hinata noticed. Haru managed to regain equilibrium before falling, leaving the Hyuuga envious... but the Jyuuken strikes that followed had nothing to do with that.

Haru gritted her teeth and did her best to weave between the blows and blocking with her staff. A few she let strike her, knowing they'd hit patches of her armor... but it was where there wasn't any protection anymore that Hinata was aiming for, like her stomach. It stung, she noticed.

Hinata had sheathed her stone kunai, ignoring it entirely in order to try for more debilitating blows this time, but ceased her attempt and hopped back as Kiba rejoined the fray. Hinata liked her teammates quite a bit for the amount of time they spent together, but as a squad of ninjas, their skills still left a lot to be desired. They couldn't synchronize their attacks in a real battle without getting in each other's way like an experienced combat unit.

With another Ice staff in hands, Haru tried to defend herself as Kiba's stone kunai came down upon her. The Inuzuka this time had hoped for his weapon to go completely the staff to damage its wielder and applied much more strength than in his previous blows.

It almost did, but got stuck deep in the Ice. Haru saw her chance and took it.

"Mmph!"

The girl's knee forced enough air out of Kiba's lungs that he wasn't even able to scream in pain when she snapped her cracked weapon in two and shoved the smaller part into his shoulder, piercing it to the bone. The thrust was strong enough to knock him down, leaving a red trail of blood on the wet ice as he slid away from the girls.

The smell of cheap iron was getting stronger, and though the pain was making it hard to think, Kiba knew he was now dangerously close to the railings of the bridge.

"Kiba-kun!" Hinata cried out, turning her head backwards instinctively as Kiba slid past her. Even with the Byakugan on, the distraction had been enough that Hinata didn't have enough time to react as Haru switched targets.

The Hyuuga still tried to get the stone kunai from her pouch, but she felt a cold, hard thing lashing out against her ankle and fell, dropping the weapon Shino had made for her in the process. It fell out of her reach with a dull clang, her head painfully doing a similar noise as it, too, hit the floor. Her Byakugan almost wavered from the pain, as her head had not recovered from the previous bash it had suffered.

"It only takes a single mistake for one to lose, even when they have the upper hand," the masked Yuki lectured, looming over Hinata with a newly crafted staff pointed at her. "It's over!"

Hinata desperately tried to search for a way out, but her eyes saw nothing. Kiba was on the floor, trying to recover. Everyone else was too far away, and with the ice and water coating the floor getting up in time would be impossible. Her opponent was only two meters away from her feet—around the length of the long staff that had caught her ankle. Hinata's own head was pounding from pain, and her entire body was tired.

 _'...What can I do now?!'_

Haru began to talk to her, something about not holding it against her, about Zabuza... Hinata honestly didn't care enough to hear; her mind was too preoccupied with the buildup of cold air around her fallen form and the mass of chakra surrounding her, connected to Haru by a thin, almost invisible strand.

Time was running out. It had only taken some seconds for the explosion that froze Team 8's leader to happen again, Hinata knew.

 _'I'm not close enough for Gentle Fist to work, there is nothing to use Kawarimi with, clones won't do anything,'_ she hastily tried to go over every ability and item she had in her arsenal, frantically hunting for an escape route. _'The stone kunai is too far away, I'm not fast enough to grab and throw the other one or normal weapons before she reacts, I can't do any offensive ninju—'_

Her masked foe was coming closer, weaving hand seals as she stepped into a small puddle.

"Sorry about this," Haru apologized with some regret. Hinata had only helped her prior to that day, and now she was about to ruin her life... "Hyoton!"

A soft, wet splash. Followed by another. Hinata's fear spiked and receded almost immediately with an epiphany. She acted.

Haru extended her hand, and the Ice chakra responded to it. Hinata closed hers and pulled.

"Ice Pris—"

Haru's concentration slipped at the last moment... because she actually slipped with it, backwards. The puddle Haru was standing on reacted to the Hyuuga's pull, moving forcefully towards her closed fist and tripping the masked girl in the process, almost as if Hinata had pulled a rug from underneath the Yuki's feet.

Hinata didn't even bother to check if her plan had worked—if it hadn't, she'd be frozen anyways. But the unrecognizable mix of Water and Wind chakra around her dispersed as she sprang forward, palm outstretched and body crouched as low as she could.

Haru still tried to swing her weapon but it was futile. The weapon went too high and barely brushed the girl's hair...

It missed. Hinata did not.

The burning pain that spread inside the masked girl's stomach didn't even allow her to enjoy helplessly sliding away during the fight as her opponents had for the entirety of their battle. And it was not only pain: she felt as if something had been ripped out of her body, somehow.

Hinata had wanted to capitalize on the opening, but she barely managed to stand. The Byakugan's sight wasn't affected by something as mundane as dizziness from hitting one's head on a frozen concrete floor but her brain wasn't as lucky, something she only realized while trying to get up.

"Hey, you okay?" She could still see Kiba running after her, after finally getting up himself. His shoulder was bleeding, but he soldiered on.

Keeping her focus on her downed opponent, she turned her head and smiled a bit. "I'm still kicking."

The dog-user snorted playfully. "A Hyuuga, kicking?"

Hinata almost retorted that kicks had their place in the Gentle Fist, but the words died in her mouth. It hung wide open, just like her lavender eyes.

"Hinata? Hinata, what happened?" Kiba asked with rising panic, focusing on where his senses told him the enemy remained. He could barely see the girl's silhouette, but she was clearly still down, recovering from the gentle fist strike to the gut. _'If it's not that masked girl what...'_

Hinata didn't even need to answer.

Before Kiba had questioned her, the Byakugan had suddenly picked up a small, orange-colored star of chakra shining brightly inside the mist, at the edge of her vision. It was dense and barely visible since it was surrounded from all sides by the blue chakra of the mist.

Then it _blew up_ , consuming most of its surroundings and forcing the mist to give space, giving it no choice in the matter.

Kiba couldn't see chakra, but the explosion of raw killing intent was impossible to ignore. Haru, who was trying to rise, almost fell again from sheer surprise.

All three of them knew what Zabuza's strongest form of killing intent felt like, even if Kiba had only been exposed to it briefly. To say that it paled in comparison would be an understatement.

"W-what the hell is going on?!" Kiba blurted out between stutters when he finally found the courage to voice anything.

"...I-I don't... I can't...!" Hinata couldn't speak, and soon gave up on the concept entirely. She, however, still tried to focus on that cloud of bloodlust. The more a Byakugan-user zoomed into something, the less they could focus on the world around them, because focusing on one area made the others blurred... and when you consider that the chakra-laced mist was still on the battlefield...

"Hinata!"

The bluenette suddenly felt Kiba grabbing her by the waist from behind before he tried to jump away with her. Startled, the girl gave out a weak, high-pitched squeak and barely managed to zoom out to her default vision range.

She saw something approaching them only an instant before it was about to crash against her. It was a thin wall of Ice easily three times as big and wide as the ones their enemy had been launching at them, and violently fast.

Faster than Kiba had been.

The Ice construct slid along the ground, barreling both genin in midair and forcefully bringing them along its path until they met resistance.

"Gah!"

Kiba's head struck the upper guardrail violently, and he blacked out before he even felt the lower ones squeezing all the oxygen out of his lungs from the impact an instant later.

Meanwhile, Hinata felt the cold wall of Ice pressing against her whole frontal body and started to freeze it and drain the chakra of wherever it touched unprotected skin. Mainly her face. It didn't help that even this far out the floor was frozen and wet, making an act as simple as standing up not that simple.

She forced more chakra through her eyes to keep the Byakugan from wavering, and just as she felt Kiba's arms going limp around her waist... just as she felt that her dojutsu would recede completely as the Ice spread over her face...

The guardrails broke.

Somehow, she managed not to scream when the barrier shoved them out of the bridge before destroying itself against the broken iron bars, leaving her at gravity's mercy.

Meters away from them, Haru sighed from behind their mask.

The mist barely allowed her to see the broken guardrails, and there was no signal of her two opponents.

 _'I hope Zabuza-sama can forgive me for killing them when he wanted them alive, but... I can't afford to waste time any longer.'_

There was no way the two would survive the ocean below. She didn't know the name of the technique, but Zabuza had used a jutsu that made the water extremely heavy, thick... hard to swim through. Ninja could handle high falls to a degree and could even touch bodies of water without sinking... but doing the two at the same time was almost impossible, especially for genin. The two would certainly drown.

It was a clash between her two objectives: the one Zabuza gave to her... and the one she took on her own ever since she started going on missions.

She knew that whatever the cause of the big burst of wicked chakra had been, it wasn't friendly. Ensuring Haku and Zabuza's safety took priority over whatever her master wanted her to do.

Worse still, she also needed to check on the Ice Prison that held Kurenai. The Jyuuken blow she had suffered affected her chakra control and got rid of the connection between herself and the dome, so the Genjutsu Mistress might have had a chance to escape.

Thus, not even sparing the broken guardrails another glance, Haru ran towards the surge of malevolent chakra she could feel from the area her brother and master were fighting.

Perhaps, if the mist hadn't been in play, she'd have spotted four pale fingers clinging to the bridge's frozen edge...

Hinata wondered which of her hands would fail her first: the one gripping the bridge, whose slippery surface wasn't doing her any favors... or the one trying to support her unconscious teammate's weight.

* * *

Haku struggled to get up.

"Dammit, d-don't say stuff like that!"

Through the thin holes in his mask, he watched as Naruto tears fell on his gravely wounded teammate. Witnessing his suffering made the Ice-user feel horrible, especially because he hadn't meant to let it happen.

He hadn't wanted to kill anyone.

The Sharingan had been a pain to deal with at range, but when he dove in to ambush Naruto in a feint to hit Sasuke, Haku understood that the dojutsu's passive abilities were much more effective at close range. He hadn't been able to perfectly calculate where each of his needles were going. Haku just fought to save his life, and got a debilitating beatdown for his efforts.

And now, looking at Sasuke, he wondered if those haphazardly-thrown needles would bring about the Uchiha's death.

Some of his needles had hit "harmless" points, others got through extremely dangerous areas of the boy's body. He didn't know whether or not Sasuke was just passing out or was actually perishing, but the chances of him surviving from where Haku was able to discern weren't high.

And to make everything worse...

"I spent... my whole life trying to become stronger. So that I could kill my brother to... to avenge my clan. I... failed."

Haku hadn't given it much thought when Zabuza said the Uchiha boy was the last of his clan... but that he was fighting to avenge his fallen clansmen? His family? That they shared a goal in their revenge?

The shock of knowing he had robbed Sasuke—a kindred spirit—of the same dream he himself had dedicated so much of his life to pursue was the only thing that kept his hands at bay. Otherwise Naruto would have been turned into pincushion as soon as Haku had been able to move again.

The only thing he managed was to re-enter one of his mirrors as he saw the Uchiha whispering something to his friend before succumbing to his wounds.

"Sasuke, this isn't funny! _Wake up_!"

Haku closed his eyes. He couldn't cry just yet. _'What have I done...?'_

Death wasn't foreign to him. Haku had killed many before while fighting under Zabuza, but... with the exception of his very first kill, none had made him feel like he was a monster as much as this one. Seeing Naruto suffering because of his dead teammate brought him back to the reality of what he had been doing all this time, the same reality he tried to run away from by hiding behind a mask.

 _'I'm not fit to be a shinobi at all...'_ he remarked to himself, not for the first time. But he had to keep going. The world wasn't safe for his sister to live a peaceful life just yet. Until then... he had to endure.

But he wasn't going to spill more blood that day. Resolved, he addressed the only other breathing human around him.

"Naruto-san, wasn't it?"

Naruto's shoulders stopped shaking, and Haku believed he had the boy's attention.

"Your friend... sacrificed himself to keep you alive. As it is, I cannot let you roam about to ruin Zabuza's plans, but you don't need to die today."

When Naruto spoke next, Haku discovered he hadn't been paying attention to his words at all.

"Sasuke... I hated you too," Naruto confessed as he gently lowered the corpse to the floor.

Sasuke Uchiha had always been a stuck-up smartass. An arrogant jerk. An insufferable genius. An unbeatable rival. But Naruto now understood that somewhere along the way, he also became his friend.

A friend that was murdered right in front of him.

Naruto's body trembled at the thought, and so did his voice. "But still..."

And the person responsible for that... was right behind him.

"He's going to **pay...!** "

Meanwhile, in a place where the flow of time meant almost nothing...

 **"Stop it...! Stupid girl..."**

A drowsy, deep growl, followed by a snore.

 **"How many times I have to tell you... I'm not your teddy bear..."**

Many creatures would find it amusing the kind of things that spewed out of the mighty Kyuubi's mouth when the bijuu was asleep, tossing and turning as he relieved memories and fantasies, through dreams and nightmares.

It had been almost a decade since the tailed beast had last woken up, and finally, a sensation similar to that of a mosquito sucking a person's blood woke him up.

The gigantic form of the fox-shaped chakra construct slowly awakened. His red, slitted eyes opened lethargically and soon the Kyuubi found himself awake.

A dank, dark and cold sewer was the fox's current lair. And most importantly, there was a cage keeping him from exploring the confines of the sewer and heavily limiting his own space behind the bars. There was barely any room for turning around, and if the cage was blocking the path on one side, walls of steel blocked the others.

The giant creature yawned lazily, but his mind was already sharp. He felt no meaningful emotions as it remembered his situation.

The Kyuubi—or Kurama, as the Sage had named him—had come to terms with his fate within the first year of his new imprisonment, and had fallen into a deep slumber ever since then, waiting for an opportunity.

It felt like a small bug was trying to drain bits of its chakra, which could only mean the chance it had been waiting for years had finally arrived:

His new host was vulnerable.

Kurama tried to make contact with him, but the seal was still too strong for that to be done freely. It was also too strong for him to forcibly pump power into his jinchuuriki, and it also blocked him from exploring the memories of his host.

Realizing his uselessness, Kurama was just about to give up and go back to sleep until he could finally meet his host, when his senses detected something.

 **"This... is hatred."** He scowled. **"Strong, concentrated hatred... but there is something wrong with this emotion. What is the meaning of this?"**

Hatred was perhaps the emotion Kurama was the most well acquainted with, but his sharp sensory abilities did nothing to help him understand the anomaly in his host's emotions.

 **"I suppose this will have to wait until I get to see him for the second time."** Sighing, he laid down to try to find dreamland once again. **"Will this one, of all people, prove to be a worthless host...?"**

Kurama shook his head, ignoring the small itch that his host was causing him to feel.

He had already failed once, that night. He refused to fail again.

* * *

An explosion of chakra. That was the only expression Haku could feasible use to describe what happened inside his dome of Ice Mirrors.

And in the center of it all was Naruto, leaking a mixture of spiritual and physical energy that was so strong, so dense, that even a person without a dojutsu was able to see it taking shape around the blond genin.

A dark orange that brought with a light that was almost blinding, and a boiling, chaotic energy that clashed with the cold air that was floating inside the Ice dome, turning it to steam. The Mirrors themselves were being destabilized by the influx of _evil_ chakra and Haku was struggling to hold them in place. The floor of the bridge, though, had cracks all over the place as it succumbed to the genin's unnaturally overpowering aura, with shards of concrete floating with the steam.

The release of chakra had an effect on the young Uzumaki as well. The cuts he had suffered by errant needles were instantly mended, and the needles that did strike him were launched away by the blast of chakra as the skin and the little internal damage Naruto suffered were healed as well.

Haku noticed none of those things, because Naruto turned in his direction as soon as Sasuke's body was out of reach, knocked away by the blast.

His whisker-like markings became thicker and the blue eyes the boy had now were stained crimson similar to his friend's Sharingan. Naruto's pupils were slits instead of the normal circular shape humans were known for, and when Haku made eye contact, he understood a simple fact that Naruto still took the time to spell it out for him:

 **"I will _kill_ you!"**

Naruto continued to growl, loudly and unintelligibly as he lowered himself down to all fours. His body was spasming slightly as it seemed to be undergoing some sort of transformation, and Haku could see that the boy's teeth and nails became long and sharp as the red chakra in the air receded, until just a slight crimson glow could be seen in the boy's skin if you looked hard enough.

He was glaring at Haku the entire time. Red eyes, brimming with hatred and desire for blood.

 _'This feral blood thirst... he's no longer human! He can't be!'_

That thought got his body back to a working state again, and Haku drew more needles as the wild Naruto rushed in. Aiming for his vital spots, Haku let the senbon fly... only for the boy to roar and knock them away just with the force of his chakra.

Naruto kept running, and Haku was barely able to move to a distant mirror in time, leaving the wild boy confused, looking around the dome in search of his prey, when suddenly all the mirrors held a reflection of the masked ninja in them.

They all shot their needles at him.

Naruto stumbled for a moment and roared, with the accompanying burst of chakra disposing of all the needles and wounds. The blast had been strong enough to disrupt the connection Haku had to his mirrors, and the reflections within all but the one that held the real one faded.

Naruto's eyes met Haku's once again. With the promise of a painful death in those crimson orbs, he crossed more than half the length of the dome in a single leap as he rocketed towards the mirror, completely destroying it with a single punch. His jump took him further into the mist, leaving the genin lost outside the cage of Ice.

Haku had once again appeared in the farthest mirror he could manage to reach, mouth agape at the damage Naruto had dealt.

"Wow!" Startled by the new voice, Haku whirled around inside the mirror only to find his sister nearing the dome. "He got through with just a punch...! How is that possible?!"

"What are you doing here?"

Haku somehow knew the girl was rolling her eyes behind her mask. "I came to check up on you, of course."

He then realized the surge of killing intent must have drawn her attention, but filed that thought away. "What about your own battle?"

"I fought the Inuzuka and the Hyuuga. I threw them off the bridge, so I came to help you," she answered simply, barely bothered by the fact she had just killed two children barely two years younger than herself. In fact, the cracks around her Ice Prison worried the girl more than the thought of killing ever had, but even that wasn't that bad. From her calculations, the Prison would keep Kurenai out of battle long enough.

"...I see," her brother replied, sighing inaudibly.

Haku had never understood how his little sister managed to simply not care about the lives she ended, and the fact that she couldn't worried him much more than the roars in the distance and the killing intent in the air. Haku could see that the mist was dissipating where Naruto landed, and soon the genin set his red, furious eyes on the only mirror with a green reflection again.

"Looks like you'll need the help after all!" Haru went to create a staff, but her brother's voice stopped her.

"Listen, run away." Haku stressed every word. "This boy is too much for you. I'll handle him."

"Are you crazy?" The girl made a staff anyways, but this one had a sharp point. "He's fast and strong! You can't take him alone!"

Haku scowled. _'Damn.'_

Naruto started to chase his target again, but more worryingly, Haku recognized his sister's tone. It was that stubborn tone; the one she used after recognizing a threat to either Zabuza or himself.

She would not be retreating.

"Haru-nii, get ready!" The girl jumped away, melting into a nearby mirror as Naruto drew closer, faster than he had ever been when his teammate was still standing.

Clutching his last needles with one hand, and channeling chakra in the other, Haku stood still and concentrated.

 **"Rraaugh...!"**

Naruto managed to bring his arms up just in time to protect his face, but that human instinct clashed with how he was using all four limbs to move, and he fell on his butt from the recoil.

 _'Now!'_ Haru came down from the top-most mirror, staff poised to impale her target. She crashed violently against the ground, leaving a small crater on her landing site.

To her surprise, Naruto had managed to dodge, as if he could _sense_ her somehow. The boy roared at the new target, once again freeing himself of the needles stuck in his body with a blast of chakra, and pounced at the masked girl.

With a scream, Haru was sent flying towards a mirror, but her brother emerged from it and caught the girl. An instant later, he dropped her outside a mirror behind Naruto.

"Thanks," she wheezed, keeping her voice down. "Can you keep him still for me? Needles won't work, as I'm sure you noticed..."

Haku frowned. He was going to break his promise to the dead if he didn't want to become one himself, apparently. "I suppose I have no other choice."

Ice formed around his hands as he sunk back into the mirror. He now held various kunai made of Ice chakra. Weapons meant to kill, not debilitate.

Flashing between his mirrors, Haku let a rain of Ice kunai fall... but even that was doing little against the orange genin. They pierced his body but soon destroyed themselves in the process, almost as if the crimson chakra was rejecting and deconstructing the daggers when they made contact.

Wounds were healed almost immediately, but Naruto still felt pain. With pitiful, distorted cries, the boy hunched over and covered his head while Haku kept assaulting him, trembling all the while.

The boy's senses started to buzz when the hailstorm stopped for a brief second.

"Ice Release: Ice Prison!"

Haru breathed a sigh of relief, but the sensation was short-lived as Haku landed next to her.

"We need to kill him right now, Haku-nii! This won't hold him for long...!" she spoke with a spike of fear. The globe-like construct was shaking violently from the sheer power of Naruto's monstrous chakra.

Haku spared Sasuke's corpse a glance. Muttering an apology, he nodded to his sister. "We'll be doing _that_ technique," he told her. "Anything else will not suffice here."

"Right," she returned the nod.

Focusing his chakra Haku held his hands to the sky and formed a massive, pillar-like chunk of Ice. He struggled to hold on to it, but his sister helped him by manipulating the structure, turning it into a gigantic sword of frozen water and reducing the weapon's weight by sharpening the edges and eroding the lower section until just a thin handle remained

The blade was big enough that it would make Zabuza's Kubikirbocho feel very insecure, if it had feelings.

"Ready?"

"Ready, sister!" Haku leaped as high as he could with a heavy sword in hand, and came crashing down onto the Prison while Haru jumped away.

As soon as the massive sword connected with the Prison, it exploded in loud a storm of clear ice shards and blinding crimson energy.

 **"GRAAAAH!"**

"Gnngh!"

Haku crashed against one of his upper mirrors and dropped to the floor, leaving the mirror with a cracked surface.

"Haku!"

Knowing her brother was in danger, Haru rushed to his side while forming hand seals. Naruto took off not much later, but just when he was about to reach his defenseless prey the masked girl slammed her hands on the ground.

"I won't let you hurt him!" A wide Ice Barrier rose from to block the genin's path. Naruto crashed into the wall and bounced backwards from the impact.

The girl sighed from relief and tiredness. A huge portion of her chakra had been used to make that Barrier, but she quickly worked through the exertion to help Haku stand. "Are you alright?"

At first, he nodded. By luck, none of the shards from the explosion actually pierced his body.

Had there been no masks between the two, Haru would have seen panic flashing across her brother's face right afterwards. As it was, she only gasped as he grabbed and tossed her to the ground just as Naruto rampaged through the frozen blockade like an angry bull and unleashed the strongest punch he could manage at his enemy.

Haku took the punch in the back and was sent flying as if a warhammer had launched him, straight between two mirrors. The masked boy rocketed away from the dome with a muffled scream of pain, fast enough that he had become just a green blur to his sister's eyes

"No! Haku-nii!" A loud noise that she was growing tired of hearing was the only thing that responded to her: ice breaking.

Fueled by anger, she felt Ice taking shape in her hands. With a furious yell she leaped at Naruto, and the Uzumaki only managed to whirl around before a spear of Ice pierced his gut, and then the mirror directly behind him as the girl drove her weapon forward with him impaled on it.

Naruto howled from the pain. While he tried to remove the spear, Haru took off in a hurry to search for her brother.

Once outside, she followed the sound she had heard until she saw a mess of broken chunks of Ice and smaller shards. Blood coated some of them, and there was a pool of mud right in the center.

"Im... Impossible!" Haru recognized the place: it was where she had imprisoned the Genjutsu Mistress. "That was a mud clone? But how? When?!"

The masked girl frantically looked around, but the only thing of note she found was a small trail of blood, right in front of her. She followed them until the end.

There, she found the broken half of Haku's mask, only centimeters away from the edge of the bridge.

As Haru heard a roar from behind her and the deafening crash from her brother's technique and her world falling apart without him to sustain them, she fell to her knees, mute.

Her logical side coldly processed what had happened:

Haku almost certainly got launched into the Ice Prison that once held Kurenai, breaking it and cutting himself in the process. But Naruto's punch had been strong enough that the Ice-user didn't stop there, and he continued going forward from the sheer momentum of the blow, bouncing on the floor and rolling away until he slipped between the guardrails of the bridge and fell into the ocean. His mask likely cracked from the impact with the floor and fell apart, half with Haku and half still on the bridge.

The emotional side was unsure.

 _"Listen, run away. This boy is too much for you. I'll handle him."_

Haru could either laugh at how her stupid stubbornness had gotten her brother killed in the same way she had killed the other two Konoha genin, or scream.

...She chose the latter.

* * *

A/N:

...

So, like I said up above, the last part will not have a whole lot of action, so it should be here relatively soon. It's probably going to be of the same size as this one, or a bit smaller. (at least from my perspective, since line breaks somehow count as a LOT of words from what I understand).

Anyways, I hope you guys liked the battles. I wasn't very satisfied with the 11K part I had after deciding to split the chapter in two, so I polished it a little... mostly with non-action parts, like exploring Sasuke's death further. Line breaks also help the word count a lot for some reason.

Just a little thing about this delay and my decision to split the chapter to release it now... well. My "test week" begins monday so I wanted to get this out of the way before that. After that week ends, assuming I don't need to do too many final exams, I'll be devoting myself to the fic. With no college I should get the chapter up and running rather quickly. I'm aiming for three weeks at the very most.

Besides all of that, I just wanted to say I'm glad you guys liked the last chapter's little short story! At least if something happens you guys know it would have ended with a happy ending. So, anyways, let me get to the Guest Review Answers now. Everyone else, dismissed! See ya next chapter!

(This feels awful, but I think should remind you all that it might be worth re-reading that section of chapter 12... sorry.)

* * *

Guest Review Answers

Pro-Naruhina Guest: Ah, I see. Faulty internet connection is awful. I write the hugest wall of texts on Gamefaqs sometimes but I only realize the internet is gone when I click "post". Nothing makes me angrier than that. Anyways, I'm glad you had a wonderful time, as you put it!

Also, Himawari is not evil... just very, very vengeful. Mess with her and there WILL be payback! At least its the impression I had of her from "The day Naruto became Hokage", and as you can imagine, Boruto tends to get the shorter end of the stick most of the time. Thanks for the Review!

Tykronos: I hope I was able to deliver at least a little bit. Thanks for the review!


	16. Chapter 16 - Shattered, part 3

Hmph.

A little piece of advice for anyone that is (or plans to become) a teacher: _please_ don't make tests consisting of stuff you haven't truly taught or barely even acknowledged during classes. Seriously. This is a huge dick move. If you have to test your students, use the things you actually spent time teaching them, or do your job correctly and dive deeper into certain topics if they are truly important. Or else they riot and nobody likes that. (Well, my class riots, at least. Glad I'm changing classes this semester)

That's biggest cause for this taking so long to pop up. College alone cost me more than the three weeks I had been hoping to focus on this. There were some in-chapter problems as well, but in short: writing is hard and life is busy. I've left a slightly more detailed note in my profile, if anyone cares. I apologize for this but, really, the biggest time sinks were completely out of my control. (And there might have been some time wasted with Fire Emblem Fates, RWBY... and Overwatch, which was my early Christmas present... but hey, I need to have fun sometimes too!)

Even though this might make me lose some new readers who skim the chapters and could get scared by how long chapter-wise I've spent in the Wave arc, **I decided to split this into two updates again, but the next part is almost out of the oven.** Because of unplanned content and my attempt to compensate for the delays, this chapter got way too big and I'm sure some of you, my current readers, wouldn't like that big of a wall-of-text.

 **But mainly, this is because my beta's dad underwent an eye surgery and left** SimplePotato **playing nurse/babysitter in these last few days.** I already feel a guilty about him doing this payless work for me on normal days... so this was also to make things less chaotic for him, too.

As a wise man once said: Please understand.

And enjoy!

* * *

 _Land of Waves arc_

Chapter 16: Shattered, part 3 (Current Version: 1.0)

* * *

Silence. Again.

Inari, discouraged, walked away from the house's doorsteps and began to wander the streets.

"What do I do now...?" he muttered. "Nobody's willing to listen to me!"

He took the moment to wipe the sweat off his brow. Running through the entire village made him tired, and considering no one even opened their doors for him after he knocked and said his piece, that's the only thing he got for his efforts.

"It doesn't matter," the boy decided. "If nobody wants to come with me to the bridge... if nobody has the courage to fight for our land, then I'll just have to help Naruto and the others by myself!"

Determined to protect what was dear to him with his own two arms, just as his father had taught him, Inari ran as fast as he could back to his house.

It had been a while since he had last used his grandfather's old crossbow... but it would have to do.

The pain and the deafening crash of the Ice Mirrors falling apart had sobered him.

"What... ugh, what happened to me...?"

Naruto took heavy breaths, and his stomach protested against every single one of them, making him wince. The cause of it all was the hole he found above his belly button. It hurt like hell and it was bleeding profusely... and there was also an odd sensation, not unlike the feeling of being healed by medical ninjutsu, as if his insides were slowly knitting themselves back. Uncomfortable.

That was the only reason he wasn't panicking, despite the thought of dying from blood loss passing through his mind. Assuming that body was indeed healing by itself, somehow, he simply used his hand to help stop the blood flow while trying to regain his bearings.

Naruto's senses were all much sharper than he remembered, but he felt a numbness deep inside his head, almost as if something was working to block him from processing what was around him.

 _'It's kinda like what happened that time with Mizuki and Iruka-sensei,'_ Naruto realized. The sensations were much stronger in this instance, though.

He then paled. The biggest difference is that he hadn't felt in control this time around. His memories were messed up too, which could only mean...

Naruto's gaze fell to his bleeding stomach again, but his eyes focused beyond that.

 _'Was that... the fox's power?'_

A scream interrupted his thoughts.

The despair in the voice—a girl's, he noted—was palpable, and it made him even sicker. Naruto felt as if he should've known who the voice's owner was and why she was screaming, but his mind was drawing a blank. Something had happened but his memories of the past few minutes were foggy.

Absentmindedly, he looked around the area as he tried to piece together what had happened. There were Ice shards scattered all over the place, slowly disintegrating as they lacked an energy source to keep them whole. There were also a few needles and pieces of concrete with corresponding holes in the ground here and there, and drops of blood in some places as well...

"Okay... I know I got here and decided to sneak along the sides of the bridge to find a cool place to make an entrance from, but then I found that wall of ice. I kicked it and that didn't work, so I went back to ask Sakura-chan and Shino for help and then broke through that thing with a steel beam. Right." He nodded to himself. "Then I tried to help Sasuke with his fight, but..."

Naruto frowned. His memories from the fight with Haku were hazy and incomplete. He knew the fight wasn't going very well for him and his teammate, though.

His eyes then landed on a body that was practically buried in a pile of Ice shards. Though he still couldn't recall the events completely, the memories started to come back to him.

Sasuke had died to protect him.

"..."

The thought still brought too many strong emotions for the young Uzumaki to properly process. His eyes started to moisten with unshed tears, but he refused to let them flow or to approach Sasuke's corpse. Instead, he just gave out a weak chuckle, which clashed heavily with the strongest emotion he was feeling.

"You'd be mad at me for wasting time instead of going out there to fight, huh...?"

Sasuke didn't answer. Naruto knew that he wouldn't, but it still hurt more than any of the insults he knew the Uchiha would have thrown at him.

Still, with that thought in mind, he hurried out of that area and went deeper into the mist. He remembered a scream coming from that direction...

He followed a trail of Ice, mud, and blood until he saw one of the masked ninjas, kneeling on the ground while staring at the broken half of another mask. The long, unbound hair told him it was the girl who fought Kiba and Hinata, but what was she doing there?

 _'Is she... crying?'_ he wondered, observing how her shoulders were trembling. Confused, he got closer, but his footsteps were loud enough to alert her of his approach.

She whirled around. Realization crossed her features for only an instant before something else took over.

"... _You!_ "

The enmity in her voice was strong enough to make Naruto take a couple steps back, while the masked girl rose. She pointed at him, accusingly, and Naruto just knew there was a hateful glare aimed at him from behind that mask.

But it was also an analytical one. That malevolent chakra and killer intent were gone, and Haru saw that while the Uzumaki no longer was walking on all fours like a beast, his eyes were a much darker shade of blue than the ones she remembered from their first meeting. His whisker marks were thicker and his impaled stomach seemed mostly healed from where she could see, too.

It was simply unbelievable. All of her and Haku's efforts were for nothing. Just _what_ was he?

"You killed my brother! You... you _monster_!"

What word could be used but monster? Nothing could describe that furious, wild creature that acted purely on instinct and exuded _evil_ as perfectly as that word.

Haru didn't know any other way to call it, but she immediately found out that allowing her emotions to flow freely was a fatal mistake.

Naruto's first reaction, before her second sentence, was confusion. He didn't remember killing anyone. But when he heard her last words...

"No! I'm... I'm NOT a monster!"

With a pulse of energy, _it_ started again.

His teeth became longer once again and the blue in his eyes was overcome by red as the pupil changed shape, but that terrifying mix of chakra and killer intent had yet to be unleashed completely.

His memories still had holes in it, but he didn't need them anymore. He understood enough already.

"That guy... your brother, huh?! He killed my friend too!"

The girl almost chuckled in response. This was exactly why she hated how Haku and Zabuza both wanted to fight against the Mizukage more for the sake of revenge than anything else. Because her brother had killed Naruto's friend, he paid with his life.

 _'And here I am, about to try to kill him because of it.'_ Giving in to the emotion, her energy flared and Ice began to form in her hands. _'I wonder... if I manage to kill him, will someone care enough to hunt me down to avenge him too?'_

Not that it would lead anywhere.

Her brother had died and she had proven herself a failure during this mission. Zabuza was investing on her, but the payoff would never be the same as it had been with her brother. Haru knew he cared for both of them, but with her brother dead and her usefulness as a tool severely limited... would that be enough to justify still keeping her under his wing? Was it just wishful thinking to believe that he truly cared for her?

Emotionally shaken from her brother's murder and her own insecurities, Haru came to one conclusion:

 _'No... I was just lying to myself this whole time.'_

Haru considered Zabuza as a second father, but he never treated her like a daughter. She would be discarded, like a broken tool that became useless. And thus revenge was the only thing she could cling on to. It was against her every ideal, but at that point, what else was there to fight for?

Without Zabuza... without Haku... she was nothing. And as a huge pile of absolutely nothing, she had no answer to that question. No purpose.

She, however, had an answer to Naruto's accusation.

"He killed your friend, but he left you alive. I will correct that mistake. You will die just like the other two!"

Even as she dashed forward, Haru knew she was outmatched... but in that case, at the very least, she could spare Zabuza the trouble and throw her life away herself.

* * *

Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, Kakashi cursed his own irresponsible attitude.

"What's the matter, Kakashi? Getting tired already...?" Zabuza chuckled, his voice slightly distorted by the influx of seemingly demonic chakra that coated him.

Kakashi didn't honor that taunt with an answer.

But it was true. He was physically out of shape—a deadly combination of the lack of constant practice and the aftermath of their previous duel—and his chakra levels were getting lower and lower from sustaining the Sharingan. He still had more than half of his reserves to go, but he wasn't sure how much they would last.

...And that's not even considering that after activating his shroud, Zabuza not only got stronger and somehow more resilient, but he also got _faster._ The enhancements weren't very significant on their own, but all of them together meant Zabuza could actually bring his Kubikiribocho back to the fight: blocking was harder and dodging also became difficult even to a Sharingan-user, especially with his invulnerability to the dojutsu's natural Yin Release.

But Kakashi had to keep going. Not only Konoha and the entirety of the Land of Waves depended on him, but so did his squad. His full squad—not just his three cute little genin. Kakashi knew that the moment he died, all seven of them would die with him.

The destruction the bridge had gone through during their duel was proof of that. Wet craters from Zabuza's Water Dragon Jutsu littered the battlefield, with the odd kunai and shuriken or burnt concrete from Kakashi's own repertoire of techniques accompanying it. He was sure that more damage could be found beyond the walls of mist that surrounded the small ring of fogless air Zabuza had designed for their fight, evidence of past failures at ambushes from both sides.

Gripping his kunai tightly, Kakashi dashed forward to engage his enemy once again. His only hope of winning their fight was to take Zabuza by surprise while _also_ keeping him on the defensive.

It took everything Kakashi had to keep up with a swordsman of Zabuza's caliber. His Sharingan could almost see the future, and what his eyes couldn't see, his own experience in the battlefield completed the foresight for him.

Kakashi was fast and skilled, but not enough to avoid everything. There was a huge tear in Kakashi's heavy flak jacket, from the left shoulder almost through the right hip, from which blood leaked freely. The strike hadn't hit bones or organs other than skin, but it and the smaller wounds he had sustained throughout this whole battle made sure every movement hurt.

His thoughts weren't on those things, however. A small opening presented itself, but just as in every other attempt, the intense chakra surrounding his enemy's body made the kunai do nothing more than a shallow cut, and Kakashi almost lost his arm from Zabuza's counterattack.

 _'Ugh... I need something to stop him from moving.'_ Kakashi continued to press the opening until he was forced to back off, repeating the endless dance between himself and Zabuza. _'Only a really strong technique has a chance of getting through that chakra cloak, but how do I do that?'_

To kill, he needed to immobilize. To immobilize, he needed a distraction. But between the lack of cover and Zabuza's extremely acute hearing, how would he go about doing that?

It turned out that the answer was... to do nothing.

Zabuza's focus wavered when both of them heard a scream of despair. A feminine scream that Kakashi didn't recognize, but the voice's owner was obvious to Zabuza. _'That was... Haru!'_

The swordsman's eyes widened from the realization but narrowed immediately afterwards as Kakashi used the distraction to blur through seals.

He slammed his hands on the ground. "Earth Release: Mud Wall!"

As the technique's name proclaimed, a tall wall of mud rose from the ground, and Zabuza growled as he heard Kakashi's fading footsteps from behind the structure.

"That won't save you from me, Kakashi!"

Zabuza wasted no time in sprinting towards the blockade and cleaving through it with a mighty, roar. The mud structure fell apart in the wake of the Kubikiribocho, and just a few meters behind it...

"Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu!"

The giant sphere of searing heat consumed Zabuza before he even had a chance to react.

The Mist jonin could do nothing more than scream in pure agony as the flames ate at his shroud. Quickly, the demonic technique's aura faded and the unnaturally strong blaze consumed it and then his skin, overloading his senses with pain until it became too much for even him to bear.

Zabuza's blazing corpse crashed to the ground, still burning.

Kakashi wanted to sigh, relieved that the battle had finally ended... but right before Zabuza's cloak faded, he felt a spike of the Kyuubi's evil chakra. Weaker than before, yes, but still a cause for concern.

Sparing one last look at the fire that obscured the dead Zabuza and the discarded Kubikiribocho that fell with him, Kakashi covered Obito's eye again to conserve what little chakra he had remaining and walked away from the corpse.

"Well, now that this is over, I better go help my students before things get worse..."

"Too late."

Instinct and years of training took over and Kakashi pivoted.

Or at least he tried to, but suddenly being enveloped in a gigantic sphere of horribly heavy water made that movement an impossibility. Kakashi only managed to turn his head, with much difficulty, to face his assailant.

He glared at the man. _'So that's the power of the silent killing style... amazing. I truly didn't hear him coming,'_ Kakashi noted with disgust.

The swordsman, undoubtedly, was smirking underneath his mask of bandages. His left arm was outstretched inside the Prison to keep it sustained. His hair was singed and parts of his skin were red from burns.

Superficial damage.

"That's what you get for underestimating me," Zabuza laughed, enjoying the thrill of victory and that look of helplessness in Kakashi's sole visible eye. "You see, Kakashi, some techniques like mine can be regulated. My shroud at its weakest doesn't work well, I admit, but it was more than enough for that pathetic attempt at a Katon jutsu. You should've gone with your affinity instead of a badly copied trick, idiot."

 _'So Lightning would have gotten through, huh?'_

Kakashi shifted his gaze to the arm that connected Zabuza and the Water Prison.

"Now, Kakashi, I've heard drowning to death is not a particularly pleasing experience..." Not being able to contain himself, Zabuza burst out laughing again, reveling in his victory. "Enjoy my parting gift, because I know _I_ will enjoy watching the life leaving your carcass behind."

Briefly, as Kakashi glared at him, Zabuza let himself imagine how powerful he would become with the power of the Sharingan. When he noticed the glare, he once again chuckled, enjoying the other man's suffering. "No matter how many jutsu you know, Copy Ninja, there is not a single technique that can get you out of there."

Kakashi, once again, had to concede that Zabuza was saying nothing but the purest truth.

With the Demon's mocking laughter echoing around him, he accepted that his fate was sealed.

Escaping without help would be impossible.

* * *

Hinata had noticed at a fairly young age that despite occasional successes, her life always found ways to remind her that she simply wasn't _enough_.

She should've known better by now.

Still, those reminders tended to be far more direct when she had been a little girl. The various Jyuuken instructors she had had over the years never minced words with her, making it clear that what they were seeing was insufficient for the heiress of the clan. Her father simply opted for silence most of the time, but the glint in his eyes told her what words couldn't.

This time it was different. There was nobody but her own conscience yelling at her for the chain of incompetence that led to her current situation.

Her Gentle Fist wasn't good enough. Any other Hyuuga in her place wouldn't have had as much trouble as she had, even at a range disadvantage. More importantly, if given an opening they would have landed a crippling blow, instead of one that only stopped the enemy for less than a minute... whatever the cause for that might be. She didn't know why her strike failed to do the heavy damage it was supposed to.

Her Byakugan wasn't good enough. If her eyes were stronger then she wouldn't have needed to focus so much on piercing through the mist when that explosion of orange chakra happened. Thus, she wouldn't have been as vulnerable as she was and perhaps would have noticed and avoided the enemy's ambush. Instead, Kiba had to jump in to save her and they almost got themselves killed anyways. Worse, she had instinctively wasted so much of her chakra in maintaining her dojutsu while the Ice Barrier pushed her, and it didn't help her in any way. In fact, it only caused a mild headache

Weirdly, her strength had been enough. Hinata couldn't believe that she had actually managed to get a grip on the bridge, considering the lingering Ice coating it to the edge... and it had been a major stroke of luck that she had caught Kiba's hand as they fell. But what was the point? She couldn't get them up anyways. Not with just one arm—which at least she knew wouldn't have been expected of her, considering her age and build.

There was a simple solution to her problems, however: The Tree Climbing Technique, which allowed her to defy gravity with nothing but her own chakra.

But her mind wasn't good enough. The pressure of being in a life-or-death situation, her own wounds, as well as the terrifying and oppressive aura that had suddenly taken over the bridge, made it impossible for her to keep calm enough to focus on getting just the right amount of chakra necessary. Hinata attempted it multiple times but her feet always ended up slipping. Each failure only frustrated her more and it all went spiraling from there, making each try more impossible than the last.

The only other ideas she had required more people, but Kiba was knocked out and she couldn't call for help.

She was almost crying from sheer frustration at her uselessness, but a small moan from below distracted her before the tears could start flowing.

"...Kiba-kun?"

Another moan. More like a pitiful whimper, actually.

"Kiba-kun!" Hinata felt happiness surging through her as her teammate awakened. With Kiba there, they could work together to escape safely!

... Kiba wasn't very pleased by her presence, however.

"Go away, Hana...!" he mumbled, only barely awake.

 _'Hana...? Wait, isn't that his sister's name?'_ Hinata shook her head; that didn't matter. "Kiba-kun, please! Wake-up!"

Hinata kept calling his name for a little while to no avail, so the girl decided to do something a little more drastic.

"Sorry Kiba-kun!"

She kicked his ribs.

"Wake—"

Twice!

"—up!"

Thrice!

"Gah, stop it!" Kiba finally reacted. "Dammit Hana, I told ya to not ent— _holy shit where the hell is the ground!?_ This is _not_ my room!"

Indeed, instead of his cozy little bedroom with a solid wooden floor, the first things Kiba saw were a thick cloud of mist hanging below his feet and a wall of concrete that ended somewhere beyond that cloud.

Panicking, and rightfully so, Kiba started flailing around as his very confused mind processed that there was nothing separating his feet from the air and that he was wounded.

"No, stop! W-we'll fall!" Hinata pleaded as her fingers slid a little more due to the sudden movement. "Kiba-kun, stop!"

"Hinata?!" Finally glancing up, Kiba immediately understood the precarious position they were in. He stopped moving... unless you counted his heart, that is, which was still beating furiously. "I think I just shaved a few decades out of my lifespan..."

They took a couple seconds to recompose themselves, and then Hinata broke their silence.

"Um... s-sorry for waking you up like that, but I didn't have a choice."

"No worries... hehe, I think I deserved being shown that a Hyuuga can actually kick things."

Despite the tension, Hinata giggled a bit. "I was going to tell you that earlier, but then..." her expression tightened. "Kiba-kun, we don't have time. Are you alright?"

"Well," Kiba's answer was flat, "my shoulder got impaled by a lance of Ice and I feel faint. I... think I twisted my ankle up there too while that mirror thingy was pushing us, cuz that's also hurting. 'Sides that I'm fine."

His forced nonchalance didn't stop Hinata from paling. Those two first facts were connected, as bleedings cause the blood pressure to drop. Now they were racing against one more clock.

And that last part... it took quite a bit of Hinata's willpower to avoid cursing something "I... I was hoping you could climb the wall. Y-you know, with chakra."

"Sorry, I don't think that's gonna happen." Kiba shook his head, and then paused. "Wait, why can't you? You mastered that thing in, like, a day!"

"...I tried, b-but... but I can't! I-I can't do it now." Hinata looked away, feeling even worse than before. "It's just not working."

Kiba looked lost for a moment. "Uh... don't worry! It's okay! We're not Shino or Sakura but I'm pretty sure we can think of something!" Then it hit him. "...Hold on, we can ask for them help!"

Hinata still looked bothered. That idea had crossed her mind, but it had glaring flaws. "They are a bit too far away, aren't they? And that girl is still out there. If... if we try calling someone she might hear it and come f-finish us off, and they can't fight her in this mist."

The Inuzuka considered that for a moment and sent a stream of chakra to his nose. "Let me check it out... hmm... ugh! They really are too far away," he concluded after a few seconds spent sniffing around. "Akamaru isn't moving either so he's probably still knocked out... shit!"

The two genin spent the next few minutes brainstorming for ideas, but nothing viable seemed to come to mind. Their plans always had a key problem they overlooked: Hinata had suggested that Kiba could use her as a makeshift ladder to climb up, but his shoulder made that practically impossible. He later suggested that he could use kunai to carve holes into the bridge so that he use the handles as a foothold, but Hinata doubted that the little daggers would support his weight.

They fell into a silence, and while Kiba kept focusing as much as he could into coming up with a way out, Hinata was becoming increasingly sidetracked by her aching left hand, which was gripping the bridge less and less as time passed. She knew their time limit was fast approaching, but remained quiet to not make Kiba nervous too.

Hinata was aware that she also had the option of simply releasing her hold on Kiba and saving herself, but she refused to consider the notion. It was her fault that he was in that situation and her responsibility to see him through it.

As the thought passed through her head once more, she tightened her hold on his hand as she glared at the other. That small action made Kiba silently realize that he had now become a liability.

 _'Dammit. Dammit! AAAARRRGH! If only she had her other hand free instead of having to save my sorry ass!'_

Believing himself to blame for their situation, he banged his own head against the wall of the bridge in hopes of forgetting the blunder that got his shoulder out of commission.

That bump was just what Kiba needed to get his brain in gear. _'Hey... that can work!'_

But... it would require some delicacy on his part to convey the plan properly.

"Hinata, I'm gonna let go of your hand."

 _"What?!"_ The girl shrieked and almost twisted her neck from how fast her head moved."No, you can't!"

"Wait, wait! No!" Kiba felt her hand crushing his. "I didn't mean it like that! Ouch!"

...Delicacy _really_ wasn't one of Kiba's stronger points, but he got the job done at the end of the day.

"...Are you sure?" Hinata questioned him, still uneasy. If he was feeling faint before, he was likely worse now. She didn't like his plan.

But the boy just winked at her, smirking. "Leave it to me! I—"

Kiba was silenced by a scream.

It forced both genin to turn towards the direction the wail came from, but the only thing they could see was mist.

They knew that voice.

"W-was that..."

"Yup. Unless my ears stopped working, it's definitely that girl we fought."

Neither genin knew what to make of that, but Kiba took the initiative to find out.

"Look, Hinata. I'm gonna do it, okay? Things up there seem to be getting wild and I think Naruto and Sasuke might need some help"

"Okay," the Hyuuga mumbled back, turning away.

Kiba's idea was to release her hand to try and to grab her leg instead, freeing that arm so that Hinata could better support herself. If that didn't let the girl climb up, at least they would buy more time... but Hinata didn't even want to look. She trusted Kiba, but in the chance he failed, she didn't want to have the memory of her friend falling to his death stuck in her mind.

She went back to staring at the edge of the bridge, just as Kiba was preparing himself to release her... and in that moment, Hinata realized the idea's fatal flaw.

"Kiba-kun! Don't do it!"

...Is what she wanted to say.

Before the first syllable even left her mouth, before she even had a chance to grip Kiba's hand more firmly... he had already let go; his arm was already reaching for her leg.

The plan's flaw? Ice and sudden bursts of movement _never_ go well together.

Having to support Kiba's weight accelerated by gravity at the moment he grabbed her ankle, was exactly the last push Hinata needed to lose her weakened grip entirely.

With instinct guiding her, she still tried to latch on the bridge again as soon as Kiba released her hand.

But it was too late.

They were already falling.

Though the words never formed in Hinata's mind, deep within, her entire being felt that death was coming. Bracing for the lethal impact and with Kiba screaming below, her eyes closed.

...And then her momentum was broken suddenly broken by _something_ that had latched to her waist.

Her eyes opened and she saw what they were: a pair of white arms coming from _inside_ the bridge. They pulled her towards the wall, making a self-defense mechanism kick in to force her eyes shut as her brain predicted a collision that never happened.

Hinata didn't see anything else. She just felt.

The shift in motions made Kiba lose his own grip on her ankle as the concrete swallowed her body.

Her senses expanded in a similar but completely different way than how the Byakugan worked, allowing her to _feel_ movement far on both sides of the bridge, even if she couldn't interpret the chaotic signals properly.

There was the lingering smell of something familiar. She felt the warmth of another human being—duller than usual but warmth nonetheless—before she was tossed upwards, forcing her body to break through a thin sheet of what felt like glass as she was shot skyward.

When her eyes opened again, Hinata found herself above the bridge, meters in the air. There was a hole in the bridge's surface, but it recomposed itself quickly, leaving a patch of unfrozen concrete as the only evidence of the hole's existence.

She heard Kiba's scream fading, before gravity took over and slammed her on the ground

The fall was almost infinitely shorter than what she thought was going to happen moments before, but it still shook her entire system on the impact.

Hinata had never felt more confused.

She struggled to get up and struggled even more to comprehend those last few seconds. _'What just happened?'_

Her eyes widened.

"Oh no!"

She ran as fast as her legs could take her towards those broken guardrails, almost slipping on the ice again... but as she drew closer, she slowed down and knelt, trying to peer through the clots of mist that hid the ocean from her eyes.

"Byakugan!"

...Nothing. There was no signal of Kiba's presence or of whoever managed to save her from falling.

"Could it be that Kiba-kun was saved too?" she wondered. "But then—"

A spike of energy cut her off, stealing her attention. _Foul_ energy.

It was nowhere as strong or intense as the last time, but when her Byakugan came to life, she recognized that shining orange glow that contrasted with the sea of normal, light blue chakra. The evil aura was once again present and similarly subdued.

Hinata knew that trying to force her sight would lead nowhere. Thus, she was faced with a choice

 _'Should I go follow that light... or go back?'_

Her choice should've been obvious.

Hinata was tired. Her body was battered, bruised. Her mind wasn't as sharp as it should've been due to fatigue and stress. She was in no state to be approaching a battlefield and knew she would be nothing more than a nuisance to her sensei and friends, if not outright a hindrance. The smartest decision was, by far, to go back and regroup with Shino and Sakura.

And yet... she was drawn to that light. The waves of negative emotions that undoubtedly were associated with it scared her, but what her dojutsu informed left her curious. It was mystifying.

Her Byakugan wasn't advanced enough to detect the differences in colors between chakra of various kinds. Far from it. Everything looked the same to her: black, white and blue... except that one light.

Before she came to the conscious decision to, her legs were already carrying her towards it.

Towards that twisted sun.

* * *

While her brain still had its doubts, in her heart, Kurenai knew she had made the right choice.

The Hyoton: Ice Prison was a technique that immobilized the target and slowly killed them through hypothermia. Haru, however, hadn't experimented enough with that jutsu to apply the chakra draining properties she had discovered in the Ice Release, which the Genjutsu Mistress took advantage of.

Others, in her place, might have lost hope of escaping on their own. They would've given up on trying and would've waited for help. If they knew the technique, they at least might've used Fire chakra to warm themselves.

But Kurenai immediately began to plan her escape. She didn't know when or if the opportunity would present itself, but if that time were to come, she needed to be prepared. In the world of ninjas, she had quickly learned that every second mattered, and every moment had to be utilized to its fullest.

She had been frozen with a kunai in hand, while the other hovered near its sister in case a jutsu was necessary. Though the Ice proved incredibly resilient, it wasn't indestructible. Little by little, millimeter by millimeter, Kurenai used her Earth chakra (which she had figured was one of the Hyoton's weaknesses fairly quickly) and the extremely small motions her body was capable of while practically frozen to carve a way out.

Progress was slow... but there was one moment where the Ice appeared to cease fighting against her will. With her chakra to weaken the structure and the kunai to damage it, Kurenai used those precious seconds to free her hands.

The Earth Release: Headhunter Jutsu had allowed her to drag herself and the surrounding terrain underground. Under the prison, Kurenai formed a Mud Clone, and made the Ice pieces that fell with her to return to the surface as she escaped.

She knew that approaching Zabuza head-on, even from below the earth, was suicide. If he could track even a user of the Headhunter's stealthier "cousin"... still, Kurenai theorized that moving slowly would allow her to bypass the Mist jonin's acute hearing. A serious fight with Kakashi was not something he would take lightly, and it would serve as the cover she needed.

Even after the explosion of chakra that she knew meant Naruto's seal was not working correctly—as if she would ever forget the feeling that lingered in the air during the battle in which her father got killed—she stood by her plan. Kakashi had the means to deal with that situation, so taking out Zabuza still was the top priority.

Techniques such as the Headhunter also adapted the user's senses, but she could only go so far by interpreting magnetic and sound waves. The other battles she could feel going on elsewhere worried her, but it wasn't until she was certain that at least one allied genin was almost falling from the bridge and couldn't get up for unknown reasons that she decided to abort that mission, leaving Zabuza to Kakashi.

Kurenai reached her destination at the last possible instant. She was able to save Hinata easily enough, but when Kiba didn't follow... she didn't hesitate and threw herself off the bridge to save him, tossing Hinata to the surface as she dove.

Her body pierced the clouds of chakra-laced mist, then the normal mist that surrounded the ocean's surface until she caught Kiba in midair.

Kakashi had warned her about Zabuza's jutsu after their first encounter. The Water Release: Lake of the Underworld made large bodies of water almost impossible to swim through. It was practically like swimming through hardening cement.

You could still use chakra to avoid falling through but... if you for some reason had to dedicate chakra to protect your body from a fall, that intersection of chakra levels where you could _also_ fall safely into waters tainted by the Lake of the Underworld was almost impossible for a normal ninja to get right. Even someone of Kakashi's caliber might have failed.

Kurenai wasn't a normal ninja. She was a master of the most sensible kind of chakra available: the Yin Release.

They landed safely. Though... Kurenai's eardrums were in a serious risk of rupturing from the sheer volume of a certain Inuzuka's screams.

"You can stop screaming now, Kiba," she said with light humor as Kiba opened his eyes and looked around, completely lost.

"...Huh?! Kurenai-sensei?!"

She nodded, with a smile brought forth from Kiba's stupefied expression. He glanced around and noticed he was now the "bride" in a classic bridal carry, and only a meter or so from entering the ocean.

He slumped in her cold, bandaged arms, where he was safe. "Please don't tell me every mission is going to be like that, Kurenai-sensei..."

Kurenai had a funny remark on her tongue, but swallowed it as she noticed Kiba's pierced shoulder and reverted to her serious self immediately.

"Let's go back to the bridge. We need to look at your wound, and then I'll be helping Kakashi."

"That'd be nice because this hurts like a b—no, wait! Hold on!" His head flew up and he looked around, startling Kurenai. "I think I hear someone!"

"Where?!"

...Stealthily following the sounds, they found a thick, jagged platform of Ice, on which a person clad in green robes was clinging to, body half-sunk in the water. Unlike before, there was no mask hiding the effeminate features the boy had hidden behind the disguise of a hunter-nin. Now, he was completely focused on trying to save himself, and had yet to notice he wasn't alone.

An enemy. Not a threat, at least at a first glance, but an enemy nonetheless. Kurenai was on guard immediately.

"Kiba, I'll shift you around," she whispered. "I know your shoulder hurts, but use your other arm and hang on to me."

Going from a bridal carry to a piggyback ride wasn't exactly pleasant to Kiba given his still-bleeding shoulder, but he endured.

"Before we go further, I'm going to warn you," Kurenai glanced backwards. "I'll be interrogating that boy. I don't know how far I will need to go, but this might become... unpleasant," she spoke a possible understatement.

Kiba gulped, but nodded. "Go ahead. I-I don't mind." It was either that or drowning...

Smiling at her genin's bravado, she started to weave hand signs. If Zabuza had a weakness they could exploit, then she would find it.

* * *

Almost as if to question Hinata's foolish, curiosity-driven decision to pursue it, it only took a little more than a dozen steps in the "sun's" direction before the chakra levels became even more intense. While it still had to overcome that first explosion, the intensity of the killing intent made going forward much more daunting than before.

But something deep inside her was telling her that she needed to see it, that following that invisible thread was important. And so, she kept walking in pursuit of that light.

The Byakugan detected that the orange chakra was pushing the mist's chakra away, but that discovery only happened when she was too close to handle the dojutsu. The orange chakra glowed too intensely for her to keep it activated, but the sounds of a nearby battle guided her feet.

If the situation wasn't so tense and serious, Hinata would have burst out laughing.

A flashy explosion of _bright orange_ that practically demanded that everyone stopped what they were doing just to pay attention to it? To acknowledge that it existed? That stood out so much compared to everything and anything around it?

She should've figured it out immediately, but the realization somehow eluded her until the last second. That she had associated _it_ with the sun in her mind also should've made it obvious enough to her, but when the mist parted, allowing the girl to witness it with her own eyes... she wanted to deny it.

 _'No... there's no way. This... this is wrong!'_

...But she couldn't. It was irrefutable.

The bright blues that she had come to associate with hope and courage were now stained with a bloody red that spoke of malice and wrath. The adorable whisker marks that complemented the carefree smiles that had always made her heart skip a beat had transformed, becoming thicker and meshing with his bared, elongated fangs to paint a scary and completely out of place expression.

Animalistic. The hunched posture, slit pupils and simply the way he _moved_ as he dodged daggers of Ice and pounced on that masked kunoichi Hinata fought earlier all suggested that he'd become some sort of wild beast, with speed and power greater than what she had ever seen from him. The girl was clearly outclassed.

But his mere presence... that foul energy that radiated from his body and made a simple act such as walking harder and harder as she moved forward until it became impossible to take even one more step and even breathe...

Things were starting to fall into place.

The times she saw him being kicked out of a grocery store... her memories of seeing him trying to enter playgrounds only for the kids to flee from him or be taken away by their parents... the way the adults treated him with repulsion or fear...

And yet, nothing truly made sense.

What was happening? How? When? Why?

Hinata found herself frozen in a futile attempt to decipher those and a myriad of other questions that arose from that simple discovery, which only resulted in a headache.

Her eyes followed what wasn't, but at the same time _was_ Naruto, and her brain was trying its hardest to not lump what she was seeing with every other precious memory she had of him, even as his fist crashed upon the masked girl's body multiple times, eventually hitting her covered face and obliterating the chakra-enhanced mask as the girl fell to the floor.

What Naruto saw behind the broken shards made him freeze as well, and Hinata almost sunk to her knees when the oppressive aura that surrounded the area ceased and every evidence of Naruto's... whatever it was, started to disappear.

It took some seconds for both of them to recover. Hinata frantically tried to pump oxygen into her system when her lungs started working again while Naruto was regaining his senses as the Kyuubi's influence receded.

He then recognized the figure lying on the ground in front of him and gasped. Hinata saw the surprise in his eyes and followed his gaze.

They reacted at the same time.

"Wait, you are...!"

"H-haru-san?!"

 _'Huh?!'_ Naruto whirled around and his shock intensified at the sight of someone he had thought dead. The realization that Hinata was alive—and possibly Kiba, too—made his lips curl upwards.

He was smiling... until he realized what her presence there meant.

 _'Shit!'_ He felt the color draining from his face. _'She was here. She saw me! This is bad...!'_

Even though he had considered that she might have known about the Kyuubi, now there was no escaping it. She now knew something was _wrong_ with him. What would Hinata do with that information? What if she told the rest of Team 8? Or Sakura?

Would they, too, start hating him like the rest of Konoha?

The fact that she averted her gaze and refused to look at him didn't help him read her reaction. But her shaky posture told him what her eyes didn't: she was scared.

Haru's voice drew their attention."Y-You... survived? But how?" she asked Hinata, before coughing drops of blood as she tried to get up.

The Yuki felt as if a bull had mercilessly stomped all over her body, which wasn't that far from what had happened. There were probably more than a few broken bones inside her, but at least there had been enough of her own Ice lying around for her to manipulate, otherwise she might have been far worse from chakra exhaustion.

Hinata ignored the question, as she didn't understand it either and thinking about that would just make her headache worse. Instead, she focused on the sense of betrayal that was welling up inside her, evident on her features. "So, you... were with Zabuza right from the beginning. Y-you used us."

The Yuki winced, feeling a small pang of shame at the accusation. "Yes. I'm sorry, but Zabuza-sama needed my help to get better.."

 _'I actually... helped the enemy,'_ Hinata sighed, disgusted. If her father ever got wind of that...

"Wait, so he sent you there to spy on us or something?" Naruto barged in. He was expecting that Haru would have a harsh reply or an angry glare for him when she turned, but she just looked tired and worn out.

"Our meeting was just a coincidence," she stated, assessing him with her eyes. Warily, she decided to test the waters. "I asked that favor then because I was in a hurry. Zabuza-sama needed to be well again as fast as possible. And..." she hesitated. "...I need to ask another favor."

"Uh... wait, what? Do you really think we'd help you?!" Naruto blurted out, feeling insulted. "We're fighting on different sides!"

"Yes... I'm your enemy," the previously masked girl readily agreed. "And you've defeated me. I don't have much chakra left to keep fighting, especially not against two at once... so what's the next step?"

Naruto, stumped, stared at Haru confusedly before turning to Hinata for help. He recoiled when he saw the horrified expression on the half of her face that wasn't covered by her hands.

"You... y-you want us to kill you?!"

" _What?!_ " When Naruto saw that Haru didn't correct Hinata, he started to become angry. "Why would you say something like that?! I-I mean, sure, you're pretty weak now and we don't get anything from letting you go, but that's no reason to kill you either! You can still, I dunno... run away or something!"

The Yuki smiled sadly at him. It was now clear to Haru that the creature that killed her brother and the young boy that she met in the woods days prior were, somehow, different people. She had made a mistake by trying to make that monster resurface in a hopeless attempt at vengeance, Haru realized. As she had always thought, that kind of "logic" would always be wrong.

But her mistake didn't change one simple fact.

"I... don't have anything to live for anymore."

"What do you mean?!" Naruto furiously snarled at her and regretted it immediately when tears began to fall from Haru's eyes.

"My brother... and Zabuza-sama. T-they were my reason to _exist._ But... b-but Haku-nii is dead...!"

"Your brother...?" Hinata tried to enter the conversation, though her eyes flickered towards Naruto for a moment. It was from seeing how he now guiltily refused to look at anything but the ground that she connected the dots. "D-do you mean the other masked ninja?! The one that fought Naruto-kun and Sasuke-san?"

Finding it too difficult to speak, the other girl just nodded as she continued to sob, leaving Hinata to deal with an even worse headache.

She closed her eyes and rubbed her temple. _'Things are moving so fast... did Naruto-kun really kill that ninja? Is that related to that... transformation? And come to think of it, where is Sasuke-san?'_

Unlike Hinata, Naruto's curiosity was stronger than his empathy, and he soon gathered the courage to press for more information. "What about Zabuza? I mean... he's fighting Kakashi-sensei, but he might come out of it alive even if he loses. Right?"

"Zabuza-sama, he... I owe him my life, and I've dedicated my life since that day years ago to repay that debt. But... he only allowed me to follow him because of my brother. That was what truly interested him; what made him help me that day. I... am not a useful tool by myself," she finished, wiping her eyes with her haori's sleeve, futilely.

Haku and Zabuza had never said anything to her, but she figured everything out as the years passed by.

That day when the swordsman had found two street rats—a little boy trying to create Ice as a last resort to bring comfort to his sick sister, who was hallucinating from her fever—she knew that Zabuza's help hadn't come for free.

But the same went for Haku's abilities. What truly drove that young boy to accept being Zabuza's tool was the hope of giving his last precious person a chance of surviving. That was the only reason the jonin kept providing for not only Haku, but his helpless little sister. It was either two or zero.

Haru's role was to assist them with menial chores while Zabuza focused on Haku's training. Though she did receive some basic training, she mostly stuck to simple things such as shopping and cooking. It took years for her to manifest the Hyoton willingly, and almost two more before she could actually apply it in combat. Only recently did Zabuza allowed her to join him and Haku on certain jobs.

"I've been trying to get stronger all this time to help protect them, and look at what happened!" she shook her head, still crying. "I got my brother killed, and Zabuza-sama lost his best tool in the process! There is no way Zabuza-sama will ever want to see me after _this_..."

"Then come back to Konoha with us!"

Both girls recoiled at Naruto's sudden outburst.

The expected shock and confusion that followed that declaration did nothing to stop the Uzumaki from continuing, even if he wilted before he kept going. "I know that... I killed your brother. I know that nothing I do can fix that, but still! I could help you find something else to live for! I can talk with the old man—I mean, the Hokage! He's a nice guy, so if we try to explain things to him I'm sure—!"

"If only things were that simple, Naruto-san." The Ice-user smiled sadly at him. "I have a special bloodline. You saw all that Ice, right? Even if your Hokage truthfully agrees to care for me... my safety in a foreign hidden village will not be guaranteed." Her gaze turned to Hinata. "You know what I'm talking about, right?"

"What is she talking about?" Naruto also turned to face her.

Hinata, still shaken by the fact that Naruto had _killed someone_ , stared dumbly at them for a couple seconds before her brain caught up with the questions.

The Hyuuga then looked away as she envisioned what could have been her own present in a faraway land, had her father not arrived in time during that incident so many years ago... and, somehow, she found it in herself to explain it without mincing words.

"Haru-san fears that our village might use her to create more children—more ninja—with her kekkei genkai. Even... even if she doesn't want to."

Naruto was, in many ways, ignorant and naive. But not even he misunderstood the message.

He wanted to lash out and defend the Konoha that he loved so much, but a part of him questioned that. If Hiruzen hadn't even been able to stop the village from mistreating him like they did, could he really say that Haru wouldn't be kidnapped and turned into nothing more than a factory of Ice-wielding soldiers?

Both girls watched as Naruto visibly came to the conclusion that he couldn't make that promise. He couldn't vouch for the entirety of Konoha.

"I see you understand now," Haru coughed, spitting more drops of blood. Had one of her broken ribs punctured her lung? That would certainly explain the pain. "So... will one of you... do me that favor?"

The brunette's gaze shifted between both of the younger ninja. She felt guilty, placing that burden on them, but when push came to shove she discovered she was too much of a coward to take her own life.

One look at Hinata was all she needed to know the girl wouldn't do it.

With only a bit of imagination, Hinata was able to put herself in the other girl's place. She could feel the hollowness and sorrow from dedicating her entire life, her _existence_ , to someone else... only for said life to suddenly lose all meaning or purpose because of her own failures. Hinata understood perfectly how suicide would be such an appealing idea in that case.

She had never wanted to be a kunoichi or to kill someone. Hinata had accepted that there was a high chance she'd have to do it eventually, but when the time came, the small Hyuuga though she would be killing an "evil" person or at least someone that was a threat to her team, which would be easier to handle. Not... a nice person that clearly was only following orders from an evil one and couldn't even fight back anymore.

Naruto, on the other hand, was mulling over that first sentence. How could he possibly understand someone that wanted to die because she was no longer useful to a heartless asshole like Zabuza Momochi? He couldn't relate to the idea very well. There was a lack of context, there.

Naruto felt like he needed more information to make the correct decision, but there wasn't time for that. Not in that situation.

But what he did know for sure... was that half of the blame fell on himself. He was sure that if he had managed to control himself and not fall to the Kyuubi's influence, the other masked ninja might still be alive and his sister wouldn't be trying to indirectly commit suicide.

If giving the girl a chance to rebuild her life in the Leaf Village was out of the question... then there was only one way to take responsibility.

"...Alright. I... I'll do it."

Naruto barely heard his name being whispered behind himself. Trying to ignore whatever judgment was lying behind the pair of lavender eyes he knew for sure were following him, Naruto drew a kunai and faced Haru.

"You... really sure about this?" he asked one final time, feeling a lump in his throat. Could he really do it...?

Haru simply nodded at him, smiling despite her guilt. "Thank you... and I'm sorry."

She was looking forward to a chance to meet her parents and brother again. She missed her father and mother terribly, even though her memories of them were muddy, but most of all, she needed to apologize to Haku for letting him die. And Zabuza... would be happier with her gone.

As she no longer had a reason to live for, Haru didn't mind dying.

...Until a far-off sound made her realize her life could have one last purpose.

* * *

It only takes a single mistake for one to lose, even when they have the upper hand.

This was one of the many lessons that the life of a shinobi taught to Zabuza, and one of the first things he drilled into the heads of everyone that ever fought under his command. It was also a lesson he took joy in teaching his enemies when the opportunity presented itself. He favored quick kills, but if he could end a fight in the slowest, most painful way possible, he would. Zabuza had no problems in admitting he was a cruel sadist.

Another lesson he made a point to drill into his students and subordinates was to not waste chakra unnecessarily, no matter the circumstances. Given that he always had lead teams focused on swiftly assassinating targets, it was one piece of wisdom that rarely turned out to be life-saving in his career as a Mist shinobi since his missions relied more on natural stealth and physical prowess than fancy ninjutsu.

It wasn't until he began to lead the life of a missing-nin that he started to depend on it. You never knew when or where one of the Mizukage's hunters would be waiting, readying an ambush. Saving chakra saved his life and that of his pupils many times in the past few years. Forgetting that lesson was the biggest cause for his last defeat.

But Zabuza never thought there would be a time both of those lessons would be at odds with each other.

He had spent some time having a friendly chat with the imprisoned Kakashi. The swordsman made sure that Kakashi knew what would happen to his Sharingan eye and the other members of his team after he drowned to death. The hate in the Leaf jonin's one visible eye was absurdly amusing to Zabuza, especially because he was drawing out his own death.

"You know, holding on to that Wind jutsu is not going to do you any good," Zabuza mocked him. There was a cheap and simple Fuuton technique that allowed the user to increase how much air their lungs could hold, and Kakashi was clearly making use of it. "Your brats couldn't do anything to me if they tried, while that useless partner that your stupid Hokage sent with you can't do anything while she's frozen. Help won't come. You are just wasting chakra... and in fact, so am I."

It was only then that Zabuza remembered that his Demon Shroud was still barely active. It barely wasted chakra, but Zabuza still chose to cut off the flow between himself and the sword strapped to his back.

The smile Zabuza had behind his mask, however, began to disappear.

Why?

Because once he did so, he saw Kakashi's existence coming to an end.

A powerful flash of white and blue took away Zabuza's vision, and the only thing he knew in that moment of sightlessness was _pain._ The scream that escaped his lips was but a reaction, and it drowned out the voice of the only being that was watching the spectacle of lights, from behind the cover of the mist.

All because of the Sharingan.

"You were right when you said I should've stuck with my affinity... and that's what I did."

Kakashi saw, from a safe distance, as the center of the Water Prison blew up in an explosion of Lightning, splashing electrified water in every direction.

Waves of raw electricity ran through Zabuza's body. The current melted through nerves and organs, burned tissue and hair, ravaged the muscles... starting by the left arm, which had been holding the Prison together. That arm was ruined beyond repair, becoming a bloodied, red mess that would never be obeying any of Zabuza's commands again.

Not that he _could_ do it even if it was intact. As a veteran ninja, it was within Zabuza's abilities to keep moving while under unimaginable pain, but his legs refused his orders, much like his eyes refused to see despite being open.

Paralysis.

Such was the beauty of the Lighting Release: Shadow Clone Jutsu.

 _'No. No! NO!'_

Zabuza could only hear his own loud screams—physical and mental—as well the hissing of the shocks running beneath his skin... until suddenly that last noise almost ceased.

As the mass of mist that he created now stood without a fuel source and slowly began to fade, it dawned on Zabuza that death was coming.

 _'How could I've been so careless?! Damn you, Kakashi! Damn you to hell!'_

Almost as if sensing the other jonin's wrathful thoughts, Kakashi stared him down as he finished stabilizing his final technique.

"You have no one to blame but yourself, Zabuza. Your arrogance was your downfall."

When sight blurredly returned to the paralyzed swordsman, he discovered from where the sounds of sparks were coming from—Kakashi hands. Electricity danced all around the Copy Ninja's body, but the star of the show was the glowing ball of Lightning chakra.

Zabuza recognized an assassination technique when he saw one.

"You complained about me only using copied things, so how about I show you a technique that I created on my own? I call this... the Raikiri."

The final result of his failed attempts at creating Raiton: Rasengan was Kakashi's original jutsu. The chaotic sphere of energy had incredible piercing power, and even more so when it was used at high speeds—something that only a Sharingan-user could do safely. No armor could withstand that kind of attack.

It was, perhaps, more than what Kakashi needed to end the fight considering his opponent's lack of mobility... but Kakashi didn't know for how long Zabuza would remain like that. In all the few times he had ever relied on the Shadow Clone's Raiton variant, he had been close enough to the enemy to end them swiftly.

This time, since he had to play around the swordsman's senses, he was too far away for to be willing to bet on Zabuza staying still. If Zabuza were to move even an inch... a kunai or shuriken could end up failing to kill him instantly, which was not a chance Kakashi could take. Diving with a Raikiri in his hands and with his Sharingan active, however, would give him the ability to react and land a killing blow even if Zabuza attempted to dodge.

It wasn't the perfect plan, in theory. Like before, if Zabuza had been careful enough to set up something to substitute with, the attempt would fail. _'I can only hope he either was too overconfident this time around or that the shock and blindness disoriented him enough.'_

With that thought, Kakashi accepted that it was all or nothing and bolted.

His original eye focused on Zabuza as tunnel vision took hold of it. His Sharingan eye was immune to the effect, but it too locked on to Zabuza, watching almost as if in slow motion every quake the man' body suffered from the clone's discharge.

What Kakashi didn't know is that his fears were for naught. The possibility of Zabuza escaping on his own was zero. The paralysis would last just enough that he'd be impaled before he ever had the chance to try.

... _If_ Kakashi could take the shortest path possible.

A whirl of leaves appeared in front of Zabuza, interposing itself between the two jonin. From the whirl came...

 _'That girl!'_

Though now unmasked and bruised, the unbound hair made it easy to recognize the kunoichi that had frozen Kurenai.

For one moment, he realized that the girl had a look in her eyes... the same look that haunted him in his nightmares almost every day.

As fast as Kakashi was moving, he wasn't fast enough to reach the girl before she slammed her hands on the ground.

 _'Zabuza-sama, I hope that I can still be useful with this!'_

Pumping every drop of chakra she was able to, a thick, spiked wall of Ice rose from the bridge, blocking the Leaf jonin's path. She smiled as Kakashi was forced to chakra-jump to avoid a brutal collision, and her knees buckled as she allowed the chakra exhaustion to lead her into the darkness.

After hearing Zabuza's screams of pain, she knew she could do one last thing to be of use to the man that saved her life so many years ago. That she had to use practically every last bit of her reserves to execute her plan was of no concern—she was expecting that the drop of her chakra levels alone would kill her, but the girl underestimated her own body. The chakra she could shape and the chakra her body needed to survive were very different things.

Maybe... just maybe, this would be enough to convince Zabuza to keep looking after her in the future...

And as the girl started to drop to the ground, Kakashi reached the peak of his jump. _'I can still kill him!'_ he instinctively realized, poising his still-electrified hands to go through Zabuza's chest as he fell, ready to impale him with the Lighting Cutter.

But he then saw, in slow motion, the moment Zabuza's body overcame the paralysis and caught Haru with his good arm before she fell, only to use her as a projectile and human shield both.

Kakashi felt his hand piercing skin and muscle during the collision, somehow managing to grab the girl as both flew from the collision. Blood leaked from the deep wound on the girl's hip to Kakashi's hands, but he had little time to pay attention to that.

The Demon was hot on their trail, his massive sword held firmly in the one hand that still worked.

Kakashi's feet touched the ground for only a moment before he leaped again, and again, evading Zabuza's furious slashes as best as he could with the girl still in his arms. An easier task than one might have thought—Zabuza wasn't at peak condition anymore, and Kakashi's Sharingan was still active. But not a task to be taken lightly.

The swordsman's rush ended when a boot slammed into his stomach, knocking him away. Kakashi took the moment to carefully set Haru on the ground and glared at the man opposing him.

"You attacked, knowing that hitting me meant killing this girl. Your ally."

"Of course. Unlike you, I'm not stupid enough to waste a good opportunity when I see one," came the sharp reply, followed by...

"I can't believe I'm hearing that!"

Kakashi's eyes widened. "Naruto!"

The aforementioned Uzumaki could be seen stomping towards the two jonin, with a worried Hinata trailing right behind him.

She caught up to him and grabbed his shoulder, forcing him to face her. "Naruto-kun, no! W-we shouldn't go there! It's too dangerous!"

"Naruto, listen to her!" Kakashi agreed in a serious, commanding tone. "Fall back and make sure Tazuna is protected!"

Kakashi's order went ignored. Naruto pushed Hinata's hand away and kept moving until Zabuza was clearly in his sights. He still had _a little_ common sense and didn't get that close, though.

Zabuza kept the boy just on his peripheral vision; Kakashi remained a threat. "The orange clown, huh?"

"I'm not a clown, you jerk!"

"I'm surprised to see you here," Zabuza continued, ignoring the insult. "So you escaped Haku's jutsu and left your friend to fend for himself, huh?"

"What?! _No!_ " The disgust in Naruto's voice was palpable. "That guy? Haku? He's dead!"

Zabuza froze. _'No... no! That's impossible! They managed to kill Haku?!'_

"And because of that, when I beat her too she started to beg me to kill her!" Naruto screamed, motioning to the passed out girl in front of Kakashi and then at Zabuza. "All because of you! She thought you wouldn't want her anymore!"

"...And she thought correctly. What use would I have for her alone? Haku was the one that truly interested me," Zabuza spat, emotionlessly. "That boy was truly talented, despite his soft heart. But... I always knew the girl's devotion to me would come in handy one day."

Zabuza's glacial response made Naruto recoil, but anger refueled his will. "You... she still tried to protect you even then, and you tried to kill her! _What is wrong with you?!_ "

"What is wrong with me? No. What is wrong with _you?_ " Zabuza turned slightly towards Naruto now, glaring at the boy while still keeping Kakashi in sight. "There are only two kinds of people in this world: the ones that use others, and the ones that are used! That's the way our world works, you stupid boy!"

"...This is horrible," Naruto heard Hinata muttering from behind him. He, however, couldn't utter a word and just stared at Zabuza, shocked by how much the man simply _didn't care._ How could such a stonehearted person inspire loyalty in anyone?

Any reply Naruto might have had wouldn't have mattered anyways. Zabuza's arm whipped forward, deflecting a kunai with his own, and the swordsman then became a blur as he raced forward to meet Kakashi head-on, as best as his damaged body still could.

Naruto felt a hand on his shoulder again, this time in a much lighter touch. Hesitant.

"Naruto-kun, p-please! We need to go," Hinata pleaded with him. "It's not safe here."

The blond boy spared one last look at the unconscious girl on the bridge's floor. She was simply too far away for him to manage to get her to safety as well, as trying that meant getting between Zabuza and Kakashi.

Reluctantly accepting that, he turned back and nodded to Hinata. "Okay... you're right. Let's go back!"

Activating her Byakugan, Hinata lead him back into the mist and away from the conflict...

* * *

A/N:

...

I'd just like to apologize again about not giving you guys the full content in one go, especially after this huge delay, but...

I really didn't want to have such an important update go live without my beta's input, but I didn't have the heart to bother SimplePotato with so much stuff while he needs to take care of his father. I hope you understand this. (For the more empathetic ones out there: his dad is fine, he just needs help.)

Like I said, the next chapter is close to done. It just needs beta'ing and editing before being posted. (or rather, the next part of this chapter. It will be named "part 4" but it's just part 3). The bridge ordeal is mostly over and, like the very first "shattered", half of the chapter isn't about the bridge battle.

I hope you guys liked this third part, however. The next one will be going live only a while after SimplePotato does his thing! (I'll be briefly revisiting the past chapters to fix some stray typos and etc in the meantime)

And to pass the time between these two updates, assuming you haven't come across this great fic already, I'd like to take the time to recommend to you guys the story **Son of the Sannin** by _**Ander Arias.**_ It's a Naruhina story where Jiraya and Tsunade hear the news about Minato and Kushina's death and hurry back to Konoha, intent on taking care of the baby Naruto. This ends up forcing the three (oh, and Shizune) to live together in one place and... well... shenanigans!

The fic is currently starting its C-rank mission arc, and since the author was kind enough to leave a recommendation to my own fic there (and dropped nice reviews!), so I'm returning the favor here! It has recently broken the 100K words mark, so it should hold distract you while I play more Fire Em—I mean, work on the fic. Yeah, that.

Hopefully you guys can learn from _**Ander Arias**_ and drop nice reviews here too? ...I'd understand if you choose to wait til the next update, though... unlike Chapter 15, this wasn't meant to be a full experience by itself.

See you all in a few days!

(Fun Fact: Maybe you'll disagree with me later, but I think this is "Chapter 16: the bad half". The next part is not only bigger but much better, IMO, and I actually dislike most of the content you just read. My reviewers/beta tend to disagree with me when I think my stuff sucks, tho, so who knows...)


	17. Chapter 17 - Shattered, part 4

Thank you for your patience and your understanding about SimplePotato's situation, guys! This delay was rough, given that college started again for both of us. Bye bye free time! (ugh!)

Before we begin... I'll take this time to leave a message to everyone that is reading this. It is not relevant to the fic but it is something that can make a difference in your life, regardless if you are an old adult with a stable job or a kid that is in high school and still isn't seriously considering this, but... _pay attention._

You should pursue some sort of second profession in life. Some sort of backup plan if your first profession simply stops being viable. For example, decades ago, my uncle chose to specialize in fixing broken/defective typewriters. It went well enough for a big while, and he earned some good money... but guess what happened when typewriters became a thing of the past? Yes! **So did he** , as a professional.

So work to have another diploma, regardless of your age, and make sure at least one profession is stable and shouldn't go away forever decades from now. This kind of fear (among other stuff) is what led me to shove my dream of getting a degree on Game Design to the side and focus on a more... traditional profession. In this case, accounting. Years from now I'll pursue my dream, but if games become unviable for me as a profession, I'll have something to fall back on. (and I'm talking about console gaming here, as I refuse to work on mobile unless it's "work or go hungry" or part of college issues, and yes, I know it's silly.)

TL, DR: Make sure you have a Plan B before Plan A can go to hell in terms of profession. Don't be like my uncle, or wait until the last possible second like my dad.

So... just in case you missed it, this chapter was split in two and this is the second part. The first one and my profile explains why I chose to do this, in spite of possible reader losses. Even though it ended up being too big anyways... after the split, that is. A couple scenes proved themselves needed, as my beta convinced me to a couple days before posting this. I think it was for the better, though.

Lastly, this chapter forces me to remind you all that this fic is rated M. Last chapter had action. This one... has something else.

Without further ado, grab your sandwich and let's end this!

* * *

 _Land of Waves arc_

Chapter 17: Shattered, part 4 (Current Version: 1.0.1)

* * *

Haku struggled to keep up with Kurenai's pace as they ran inside the mist, even though the kunoichi was carrying one of her genin students on her shoulders—for mobility purposes only, as Kiba's shoulder had been patched-up minutes prior. His bloodied coat had been discarded, however.

 _'Genjutsu is surely amazing,'_ the Yuki mused, sparing Kurenai a glance. What was supposed to be an interrogation to discover possible backup plans and weaknesses Zabuza might have had ended up revealing to both Kurenai and Haku that their final goals matched, to their complete surprise.

It all made Haku wonder if Zabuza had been that unaware, or simply didn't realize that Gatou was actually important to the Mizukage. Despite his wish for the hat, the swordsman had a certain distaste for politics... but in the end, it all meant nothing.

Haku had to reach Zabuza and inform him that Konoha was fighting on their side.

"Shino and the others are up ahead," he heard the Inuzuka reporting, and soon enough they found Tazuna and his two bodyguards.

Despite being the only one that _wasn't_ a trained ninja, Tazuna somehow sensed their presence first.

"What in the blazes?!"

The bridge builder's shock at seeing Haku right behind Kurenai instantly made Sakura and Shino be on their guard as they turned around.

"Kurenai-sensei, behind you!"

"Calm down! He's on our side!" Kurenai shouted once both genin moved in front of Tazuna and drew shuriken. The two stood around confusedly as the woman lowered herself to drop Kiba.

"Sasuke is in this direction; Zabuza and Kakashi-sensei are in that one!" the dog-user said, pointing with his good arm to somewhere in the mist.

"Thank you, Kiba. Stay with them, and please don't move your shoulder if you can help it."

The Inuzuka didn't even have the chance to reply to Kurenai, as she and Haku took off immediately.

"...Okay. What was _that_ all about?" Sakura asked while scratching her head idly. "Isn't that guy the one that was fighting Sasuke-kun? Why is he even coming from the other side of the bridge?"

Kiba became uneasy. "Um, look. I don't really get all the details but... ugh, I don't even know where to begin."

Seeing his teammate hiding his face in frustration, Shino tried to help him. "Start from the beginning."

"Why, thanks Shino," the Inuzuka muttered, rolling his eyes.

"Bug-boy is right," Tazuna frowned. "Last we heard of you, you were fighting that other masked person while the girlie came to get help. Start from there."

After a brief apology to Shino, Kiba spent a couple minutes explaining what had happened until that moment. From when Hinata rejoined him against Haru, to the end of Kurenai's illusion-based interrogation.

"...So let me see if I got it right," Sakura began, "Zabuza wants to be the next Mizukage, and Gatou is working for the current Mizukage, so it is in Zabuza's best interests to break his contract with Gatou?"

"Yeah, something like that," Kiba nodded, not fully confident. "They were kinda vague, but that's what I got out of it."

"No, that makes perfect sense," Tazuna said, crossing his arms. "This land has brought a lot of profit to Gatou ever since he took over two years ago. Not only is our country's economy his to do whatever he wants, but a lot of his ships and wares are stored here, and because he has the Daimyo eating out of his hand, he doesn't have to worry about taxes. The Land of Water is not far from here, so I'm sure many there, including their hidden village, depend on Gatou's shipped goods... legal or not, from food to weapons. If that Zabuza fellow really wants a shot at a coup d'etat then fighting against Gatou is the right thing to do."

"This country really is that important to Gatou, huh?" Kiba shot back as he scratched his chin idly.

"You have no idea, dog boy," the bridge builder scoffed. "I've seen the warehouses Gatou has. This land is more valuable to him than Konoha is to the Land of Fire, I'd wager."

Tazuna's musings left the group in silence as they pondered on his heavy words... until Sakura realized Kiba had failed to mention one thing.

"Hey, Kiba."

"What?"

"What happened to Sasuke-kun and Naruto? I mean, the guy they fought somehow ended up in the ocean, so they must have won, but they never came back..."

"Oh... S-sasuke? I... well..." he gulped and looked away. That was a question he had been hoping that Sakura would've forgotten about.

His nervous reaction was enough to cause the other three present to be on the edge.

"Kiba, did something happen to them?" Shino inquired calmly, but even he became unsettled when Kiba disclosed what he did know about the situation.

It started with a heavy sigh. "Naruto's fine but... listen, Sakura. About Sasuke..."

* * *

Hinata wanted to kick herself. Naruto had halted and, between the silence and the pained expression that his refusal to make eye contact failed to hide... had she, again, said something she shouldn't have?

 _'Maybe I should change the subject... no. No, this is too important to let go.'_ the girl decided.

Steeling herself, she slowly repeated: "Naruto-kun, w-where is Sasuke-san?"

His eyes closed shut with a deep frown. As much as he had tried to hold them back... as much as he tried to remain strong, the weight of the pain and his failures was too much.

Hinata had her answer when tears began to escape Naruto's closed eyelids, but he tried to force something through his throat anyways.

"Sasuke... Sasuke is—"

"This is worse than I thought..."

A new voice interrupted Naruto. But... it wasn't talking to him. It was a little too far away for that.

Hinata, by instinct, futilely tried to scan the area to find the voice's owner. Naruto on the other hand, practically _flew_ towards it, as anger took over.

"I know that voice!"

"Huh?!"

The girl's shock wore off with a breath of frustration. Naruto had ditched her to run off towards the unknown, _again._ Left with no other option, she hurried to follow him before his chakra signature became too mixed with the mist's.

She caught up with him just in time to see Kurenai together with the unmasked—and completely soaked—Haku crouched over what looked to be Sasuke. The jonin's hands were glowing green as she tended to him, while Haku stood by, focused intently on the Uchiha's wounds.

"What the hell are you doing here?!" Naruto demanded with a scream, pointing at Haku... and then, confused, he moved his pointed finger to Kurenai. "And you too... weren't you frozen?! And—!"

Kurenai just sighed, ending the Mystic Palm. "Naruto, calm yourself. This—"

Something inside him snapped.

"Calm myself? Calm myself?! How can I—!"

A tug on his sleeve interrupted him. When he turned around, Naruto was suddenly face-to-face with Hinata. The girl didn't even mind that her ugly Byakugan was there for him to see.

"Please Naruto-kun... calm down," she pleaded. The worry in her tone gave him pause. "They are trying to help him... yelling at them won't do anything."

He stared her down for a couple seconds until he was forced to accept her words, and despite his defiant growl, he backed down, allowing the girl to take over as his wrath receded.

Sparing one worried glance at Sasuke's needle-struck, bleeding form, Hinata faced her teacher. "Sensei, what is happening?"

Much like what Kiba had done to Tazuna and the other genin, Kurenai briefly explained their situation, all while Haku carefully analyzed Sasuke's body and removed a select few needles he deemed safe to touch.

"And... you're on our side now, is that right?" Hinata then asked Haku, wary. She had thought to thank Kurenai for saving her first, but that wasn't important right then. In the corner of her mind, she noticed her sensei no longer had her hands wrapped in bandages.

"Officially, not yet," the Yuki answered, frowning as he carefully looked over Sasuke's body. "I had planned to talk to Zabuza-sama straight away, but your friend's condition is critical. If I don't focus on him, he won't survive."

"Wait, Seriously?!" Naruto didn't notice Hinata wincing from his volume. "You can help him?!"

"I am _trying_ to," Haku corrected, conflicted. "Uchiha-san surprised me in that last moment. I didn't have the time to aim as well as I normally can." Once Sasuke had gotten close up, it had taken everything he had just to slow the genin down, and he still managed to get punched away before Sasuke's body stopped working.

"So he can be saved, right?!"

Haku finally looked up to Naruto, and his expression wasn't encouraging. "This wasn't done with precise aim like with Zabuza-sama," he repeated, "nor with the same areas being hit by my senbon. I'm not fully sure we can make him come out of that near-death state now, or how he will be after waking up. Some of those needles hit nerves, vital organs, and important blood vessels as well. It's... complicated."

From what Haku could see, Sasuke had been forced into unconsciousness because each part of his body had been individually shut down, rather than all at once. A few of the needles, though, either only barely struck the spots they needed or went far too deep into the boy's body than what was necessary. And that is not considering the various other needles that struck him elsewhere or the ones that went in the wrong angles... knowing which needles were safe to remove and how to fix the damage each caused was, as Haku said, complicated.

That didn't squash Naruto's spirit. "But there's still a chance, right?! H-he's going to be fine, won't he!?"

Kurenai looked up at him with a pained face. "Naruto, I really wish we could say yes, but Sasuke will need a real doctor to look over him before we can really confirm. There might be lasting damage from this. We... simply don't know."

"Right now we are only minimizing the damage and healing what is possible with basic medical ninjutsu," Haku added, but unlike Kurenai, the boy had a small smile for Naruto when he raised his head. "But he isn't at risk of dying, that I can say for sure."

"Thank goodness..." Hinata sighed in relief, smiling. Said smile widened when she saw that Naruto, too, looked relieved and happy—concrete proof that he and the Uchiha heir had strengthened their bond in these past few days.

The moment was cut short when Kurenai found a use for them. "You two need to make sure Zabuza knows he shouldn't be trying to kill Tazuna anymore. I need to stay here to help him with Sasuke. Can you do that?"

"...You want us to go between that guy and Kakashi-sensei?" Naruto shouted with clear disbelief. That was just suicidal!

It was Haku that answered, without even looking up. "Use a clone and you'll be safe. You just need make sure to draw Kakashi-san's attention at the same time, or one of them will use the distraction to kill the other."

Naruto gulped but forced out a boisterous declaration and a thumbs-up nonetheless. "Alright! Leave it to me!"

Smiling, Kurenai then looked at her student. "Hinata, guide him with the Byakugan," she commanded, to which the girl immediately nodded.

"Kurenai-san, I will remove this needle but you must stop the bleeding as soon as possible and heal the nervous tissue as best as you can."

Kurenai turned away from them, now fully focused on Sasuke. "Right," she nodded to Haku, palms glowing green again.

As they resumed their work, Naruto and Hinata exchanged a look. Nodding in unison, they doubled back to follow the loud sounds of steel crashing against steel.

* * *

...Or at least, they tried to follow.

The sounds changed direction every few seconds—a testament to the level of speed involved in the battle—but before Kakashi and Zabuza entered Hinata's range the sounds simply ceased to be, almost as if to spite the two genin. The killer intent in the air told them they weren't too far, but they were forced to halt.

"Dang, I can't hear anything!" Naruto whined loudly, looking around aimlessly. "I hate this mist..."

 _'Are we too late?'_ Hinata thought with dread as she tried to force more chakra to her eyes. Her Byakugan was barely affected by the effort, but soon she stopped as her eyes detected movement. "I... I think the mist is going away!"

"Uh, it is?" Naruto looked around, but he couldn't see a difference.

"Yes!" the Hyuuga confirmed, happy that her special eyes were seeing more and more each second that passed. Until eventually...

"I found them! There's Kakashi-sensei and... what?"

"You fo—hey, what are you doing?!"

Unintentionally giving him a taste of his own medicine, Hinata simply took off without him, leaving an angry Uzumaki scrambling to chase after her, for once.

"Hey! Wait up!" he yelled as he ran until she braked as suddenly as she had started to run. Naruto almost knocked her over as he skidded to a stop.

"Why'd you run away like that?!" he demanded, hypocritically, but Hinata never answered. She just kept silently staring ahead with a horror-filled expression on her face.

It didn't take long for Naruto to follow her gaze and saw Zabuza, pinned to the ground by Kakashi. There were shuriken and kunai buried deep inside the swordsman's one good arm, and Kakashi loosely held his last kunai above Zabuza's neck. Zabuza was struggling to free himself, and in the position they were, Kakashi would've just killed him... but...

"To use and to be used... hehehe! How does it feel to be on the other side of that story, Zabuza?"

A new voice drew Naruto's attention and he finally understood why Hinata seemed so terrified. He had never seen or heard a description before, but there was no doubt in Naruto's mind about the man standing a fair distance away from the two jonin.

Dressed in a sharp, obviously expensive suit, carrying himself like he owned the world and flanked by _dozens_ of dangerous-looking thugs carrying weapons such as swords, bows and pikes... there was simply no way it could've been someone else but the president of Gatou Corporation himself. Who else would be able to hire so many mercenaries?

He was mildly overweight, not very tall. Between the cane in his left hand and the bandages covering the other, his presence was far from intimidating. What horrified him and Hinata both wasn't Gatou or his bodyguards, but what he was doing.

"You _will_ pay for that, Gatou!" they heard Zabuza screaming to Gatou as he continued to try and shake Kakashi off. He succeeded, but he could hardly stand up on his own. That didn't stop him from sending to Gatou a murderous glare with as much killing intent as he could manage.

"Didn't you hear what I just said, Zabuza? The whole point of this is not paying you anything!" Gatou laughed merrily, but soon he stopped. "Oh, I see," he feigned realization, "you are referring to this, aren't you?" he looked down to his feet.

One of them was buried in the unconscious Haru's neck, on which he was supporting his weight—just enough to not suffocate her.

"You know, I didn't like very much what you did to my hand, you little bitch. You gave me ugly burn scars that will cost me a fortune to remove!" he spat, literally, removing his foot from her neck. He took one moment to admire the big, dark purple bruise he had left on the defenseless girl, smiling at the sight. "And I know just the way to return the favor..."

He raised his cane and pressed a hidden button carved in the wood, making a small blade pop from the cane's bottom, and his smile turned outright wicked.

"Ah, it's a pity you aren't awake for this!"

Naruto and Hinata would never forget that moment.

Gatou slammed his cane on the girl's throat as violently as he could, grinning wickedly when it pierced skin and crushed her windpipe. He quickly removed the now-red cane from inside her and shoved it in another spot of the neck, repeating the process again and again and _again..._ until Haru's neck became nothing more than a mangled mess in a bloody puddle.

The magnate never paid any mind to the screams he heard or the two people that moved towards him when he revealed his secret blade. He knew they'd never reach him in time.

" _You bastard!_ "

The first one that moved was Zabuza. As soon as he got up he tried to rush at his former employer to give him the death he deserved, but Gatou had prepared his mercenaries in advance. A well-placed arrow to his thigh was all it took to stop the wounded swordsman's charge.

The second one was Naruto. Roaring loudly, the orange genin took off before Hinata could even think of stopping him, but the same couldn't be said for Kakashi. The silver-haired man moved faster than Naruto could see and grabbed him from behind.

"Let me go! _Let me go!_ "

"No, Naruto! Stop!"

Even though the boy was kicking his wounded torso while trashing around in an attempt to escape, Kakashi managed to turn Naruto so that they were facing each other. The Sharingan eye was locked on to the boy's own blue ones, but Naruto would later realize that even if Kakashi had resorted to genjutsu then, it wouldn't have mattered.

"There is nothing you can do anymore, Naruto. She is dead."

As if someone had dumped a bucket of ice-cold water on his head, the blazing fury in the boy's heart was doused by Kakashi's words.

It hadn't been too long since he had been forced to wrestle with that reality. When he came to his senses and rediscovered Sasuke's "corpse", he had felt that same guilt and uselessness—that he could've done _something_ to stop it all—but the brutality of Haru's murder made it so much harder for Naruto to stop the tears from running free.

That Kakashi pulled him closer and wrapped his arms around his back in an attempt to comfort him just made it impossible.

"Dammit... _dammit_!"

Meanwhile, with no one to support her, Hinata was trembling, fighting her own body.

The Byakugan had many unsolved mysteries still, such as what were the conditions to trigger a burst of increased and more detailed eyesight. Hinata had no idea of what it could be, but she despised her eyes for choosing that _exact_ moment to become stronger.

The blade cutting skin and muscle... the wooden cane crushing the larynx and fracturing the spine... the lungs, working desperately to get just a little bit of oxygen, only to be flooded with blood... the torn-up chaos that was a human neck... Hinata had seen it all in excruciating detail.

The Hyuuga girl's already pale complexion was even whiter than usual, and there was a mess inside her own throat trying to force its way up. It took a strength she didn't know she had to just stay conscious, especially when Zabuza released a burst of killing intent that it knocked out a couple of Gatou's goons with its sheer intensity.

To say that the swordsman was furious would be an understatement.

" _Gatou..._ " he growled dangerously, getting up. "When I get my hands on you I'll make you regret that day that whore you call a mother brought you into this world!"

The gangster just laughed at him.

"Why are you so mad, Zabuza? I was just doing you a favor! From that speech about tools you gave earlier, I thought you didn't care. Or..." he smirked knowingly, "was that a lie? Is there a soft heart beneath all that coldness, Zabuza?"

That caught Naruto's attention.

Gatou only got a growl as a response, and it made him laugh even harder. "How pathetic! So much for a demon... tsk!" He turned his back on Zabuza and began to walk away, completely assured of his own safety.

"If you want to kill me so much, I'll be waiting at the end of this stupid bridge. Try to kill some of these guys for me, won't you? They cost me money too. Not that you'll do much, wounded as you are... Kitty of the Hidden Mist."

Gatou's mercenaries opened a way for him. While a few laughed with or openly glared at him—the archer, in particular, paled as he understood why he was told to not aim to kill—most seemed excited at the prospect of a good fight coming up as they readied themselves for battle.

With Gatou's mad laughter still echoing around the misty bridge, Zabuza fell back some steps.

"Kakashi... my contract with that scum is null and void. The price for betrayal is death, and I'm sure you realize what that means for your mission."

"Yes. We are on the same side now." Kakashi released Naruto and pushed the boy behind himself. "How do you want to do this?"

Zabuza glared at his left arm. _'Those burns...'_

Even if his other wound could be healed, his career as a ninja was over. His dream of becoming the Mizukage... was officially out of his reach. With his followers either dead or captured... he had nothing to lose anymore.

"Gatou is mine; that's unnegotiable. I'll carve a path to him, you can take the cannon fodder whenever you want."

Before Kakashi could answer, Naruto got in the way. "But how are you going to fight?! Your arms... they don't look like they are working right now..."

Hinata forced herself to speak, if only to try to focus on something other than Haru's corpse. "T-the tendons... one is cut and the other is... gone." Looking at Zabuza's almost molten left arm hadn't been her best idea yet, even with her vision being devoid of color.

"Not a problem." Zabuza sucked in air through his mask, pulling the bandages inside his mouth and tearing them apart with the shark-like teeth he had kept hidden behind them.

Gatou's mercenaries watched him curiously, warily... and Zabuza knew that would be the last mistake of more than a few of them.

"Boy... toss me a kunai."

Raising an eyebrow, Naruto did just that. _'Why would he want... holy shit, this guy is crazy!'_ he screamed inside his mind when he saw Zabuza's head lash out to grab the kunai with his teeth.

Zabuza saw his death right in front of him and didn't hesitate. With a roar, he blazed through the mob of mercenaries.

As damaged and tired as he was, even with an arrow to the thigh, his speed and instincts were leagues above any of the sellswords Gatou had. From surprise alone he managed to kill five.

He dodged swords, slit throats, severed arms, punctured lungs, destroyed shields... all while moving forward as best as he could, with nothing but a mere kunai in his mouth. But skill could only take him so far.

The sheer range of an enemy's naginata was what brought about his first wound and his kidney's death sentence.

"Yeah, kill him!" Zabuza heard one of them cheering, but the man had made the mistake of being too close. A fatal mistake.

Despite their increasingly smaller numbers, the mercenaries were gaining momentum on Zabuza, all while Gatou was busy, starting with disgust at his bloodied boots

"Ugh, this was my favorite pair!"

...Then a head rolled away from the mob, leaving a trail of blood on the bridge until the skull stopped to gaze with its dead eyes at its former boss.

Screaming, the man jumped backwards, but the decapitated head was soon forgotten when a deafening roar came from within the crowd. A blur tore through the last human shields that that separated Zabuza from its target, and the wretched smile he wore was positively demonic.

" _GATOU!_ "

"Aaaiie!"

Gatou saw his death right in front of him and didn't hesitate. He turned tail and ran a fast as his little chubby legs could take him, only to trip in his scramble to survive and crash on the bridge he loathed so much.

"No, no!" he turned and crawled backwards and Zabuza approached. "Someone do something! _Help me!_ "

The mercenaries didn't move an inch. They all knew it was already game over. They did their best, though—there were enough weapons piercing Zabuza's back that he might've been mistaken for a porcupine.

Vengeance kept Zabuza going.

"You asked me for a favor, Gatou..." Zabuza began, grinning widely, showing two rows of sharp teeth to his prey and the kunai between them. "I did it. I killed quite a few of those trashy mercenaries... so now it's my turn to ask you something."

"SHUT UP!"

Desperate, Gatou shoved his cane at Zabuza. The blade barely nicked skin, getting stuck in the chainmail underneath Zabuza's blue sleeveless shirt. "Get away from me!" he screamed and shoved it further in, but the swordsman whipped his damaged arm and knocked the weapon away.

Gatou's bladder acted on its own will when he felt the bridge wouldn't go any further.

"Keep hell's gates open for me, will ya?" Zabuza grinned at him, like a predator that had cornered his next dinner. "I'm coming to torment you for the rest of eternity, Gatou!"

" I'll give you anything! Money! Weapons! Women! Whatever you want!" Gatou pleaded, bawling like a baby. "Just please... don't kill me!"

Zabuza stopped and made a thoughtful face, restoring Gatou's hopes.

"Hmm. In that case..."

A deep, malicious chuckle crushed them.

"How about _your head_?"

"Nononono! NO! _NOOOOOOOOOOO_ —! "

The kunai mercilessly and completely tore through Gatou's neck in one wide slash, silencing him forever.

His head, frozen in a mute scream, rolled away until it fell into the ocean. The waters soon became the greedy man's official grave when Zabuza kicked the corpse with all his strength, sending the dead carcass to join the head.

The only thing that remained of the magnate was a thick trail of blood on the ground.

"An eye... for an eye, you bastard," Zabuza spat, with some difficulty.

He then turned around and saw many of the mercenaries staring at him as if he were some sort of demon. _'Just how I like it...'_ he almost chuckled.

A single glare was all it took for them to clear the way for him, and even though his vision was blurring horribly from the blood loss, he saw a familiar green shape hovering beside Haru's dead body.

 _'...Haku? He's actually alive?'_

The thought that perhaps he wasn't hallucinating—or that Naruto had lied—gave him enough strength to keep moving forward... but his wounds were too grave. Zabuza managed only a few meters before his body gave out on him and he fell, surrounded by the mercenaries.

On the verge of dying, he heard one of the mercenaries rally the others, convincing them that since Gatou died that raiding the village was their best option to earn some quick money.

Zabuza knew that Kakashi was in no condition to handle a mob of that size. He wasn't sure that Haku could bring himself to fight at that moment either, and Kurenai... even if she somehow wasn't frozen, he doubted the kunoichi could cast a genjutsu on such a large area before the mercenaries advanced. Those high-level illusions simply take too long to use, and whatever remained of his mist's chakra wouldn't help. Even Naruto's shadow clones would amount to little on their own, given their frailty.

But judging from the sounds he heard in the distance... maybe there was worth in holding on for a little while longer.

If Haku was indeed alive... he had one last thing to do before death claimed him.

He refused to die just yet.

* * *

What had initially seemed like a hopeless situation was completely reversed as Inari arrived with hundreds of villagers in tow, all armed and ready to defend the bridge that represented their country's hope.

That had been enough to rally Naruto into entering the fight with a few dozen shadow clones of his own, and Kakashi helped sell the illusion with hundreds of intangible, normal clones.

"Let's get out of here!" one of the thugs screamed as he and the rest of them run away in fear, jumping from the bridge. Some fell to the ocean, but all of them eventually ended up in the ship Gatou used to transport them, and fled the country. Of course, thanks to Zabuza, there were far fewer men aboard than before. Many corpses were left to rot in the unfinished end of the bridge, but nobody paid attention to the bloody trail the swordsman had left behind.

"We won! We won!"

The laughter and cheers from the villagers were deafening. The smiles were contagious, and Hinata was no exception to that, as emotionally and physically drained as she was.

She saw Tazuna crying his heart out, clearly overwhelmed by the sight of the other villagers finally finding the courage and hope he had thought died with Kaiza. Tsunami had tried to speak with her father, but she ended up just being a shoulder for him to cry.

"I-I can't believe it...! Everyone came!" he exclaimed, crushing the poor woman in a hug.

Hinata also saw Inari and Naruto hugging each other, laughing merrily. She didn't understand how it happened, but there was no doubt in her mind that Naruto had found a way to change the boy's mindset... causing a ripple effect that resulted in this.

"You rocked, Inari! That was so badass!"

"Heh, it's all because of you! If you hadn't saved me and my mom, we wouldn't be here right now!"

Hinata's smile widened. Her eyes then caught a certain pinkette crying tears of happiness while Kurenai struggled to keep her away from Sasuke, whose condition was apparently still unstable.

"Sasuke-kun! Y-you're alive!"

"Sakura, no! He's still wounded!"

"Can't... breathe...!"

Hinata had no doubt seeing her crush bloodied and full of needles had been a shock for Sakura, but even as she watched the poor Uchiha almost being strangled to death, Hinata felt a surge of happiness that he was awake in the first place.

That happiness only increased when she spotted a limping Akamaru, who had somehow knocked Kiba to the ground and was licking his face incessantly. Seeing the little puppy's simple love for his master always warmed Hinata's heart, but even though Kurenai had already mentioned it, seeing Kiba alive and well lifted a weight off her shoulders.

Shino was with the two as well and nodded in her direction. Hinata was just about to wave to him and join them when she heard a sound full of grief amidst the loud cheers. Her head whipped backwards and she saw someone crouched over Haru's body.

Hinata's happiness drained away completely.

Haku was at just the perfect angle for her to see the terror in his expression. He was cupping Haru's face with his hands, shaking her desperately, begging her to wake up... but no matter what he tried, she never awakened.

Hinata saw the instant when reality overcame his denial, and almost all the strength left Haku's body. He buried his face on the girl's chest, hugging her tightly, uncaring of all the blood that soaked him as he clung to the last bits of her warmth. That his shoulders were still trembling uncontrollably was the only evidence that he was still crying.

The sight was almost too much for the Hyuuga, especially with the monochromatic memories of the other girl's murder fresh in her mind.

When she tried to look away, she saw Kakashi approaching, with Zabuza in his arms.

The multiple spears and swords that had destroyed the Mist jonin's back had been removed, and blood was flowing freely from his wounds down to Kakashi's arms. The Leaf jonin gently lowered the swordsman to the ground, right next to the Yuki siblings, drawing the attention of the only one of them that was still with the living.

The villagers were still too happy over their victory to notice what was going on, and the loud cheers made it impossible for Hinata to overhear Zabuza's final conversation with Haku. Not that she would've—she couldn't intrude on such a personal moment. And, most importantly, she didn't want to witness another death. Haru and some of the mercenaries were already hard enough for her to handle, and she had already seen the extent of Zabuza's wounds. That he still clung to life was a feat worthy of respect.

Wiping tears she hadn't noticed were there until then, Hinata left to join her teammates. On her way she saw that only one of her fellow ninja also had been watching their former enemy's last moments...

Like it usually did, her gaze lingered on Naruto for a little more than it should. This time, he caught her looking. In that brief moment, until he looked away, there was a flash of panic in his wide, blue eyes—or was it fear?—that Hinata couldn't comprehend.

Conflicted and without knowing what to feel about the end of their encounter with Gatou and his men, Hinata slowly made her way back to her team.

* * *

When Haku lowered his sister's body to her final resting place, the only thing he could feel... was hollowness.

One hour had passed between his master's last stand and then, but he barely registered it. The last thing he had a clear memory of was the last words Zabuza spoke, before he, too, perished.

Haku had never imagined he'd actually cry for him as well, but after hearing what Zabuza had to say...

"They need to be buried," Kakashi eventually told him, once he saw the boy didn't have any more tears to shed.

"We will help you," he remembered Kurenai's voice, but he didn't know when she had approached them.

The two jonin had sealed Zabuza and Haru's corpses into scrolls and eventually led him through the nearby forests to a cliff that overlooked the bridge. By the time they had arrived, the construct of concrete and metal was empty—the villagers had gone off to commemorate their victory and freedom, while the genin were sent to the local hospital to be healed of their injuries.

But Haku didn't dare to look towards the bridge. Even if it was too far away, even if most of it was now in his clothes, dried... he knew he'd see a pool of her blood somewhere. He was far too close to the edge of the cliff to risk seeing something like that, even if it was all in his mind.

Digging Haru's grave kept him busy. He didn't need to think of anything while his body was moving on its own, such as from where Kakashi had gotten a shovel or the small wooden pieces to make crosses to loom over the graves.

Even while seeing his sister's face slowly disappearing each time he dumped more earth into the hole, somehow, he kept himself from breaking down.

 _'She'd not want to see me crying,'_ he told himself over and over again, holding on to that mantra as if it were a lifeline.

It was only when there was nothing more to be done that he was forced to face the reality of the situation. Much like when he had first seen her body, his legs gave out and he fell, consumed by grief as the reality that he would never, ever see his sister again sunk in. That the layer of earth beneath his feet was forever separating him from the only person he had left in the world.

He didn't know where his body found the energy to cry and scream as much as he did, given how much he had done both on the bridge, but for what felt like hours... it was all he could do.

It took him a long time before he noticed the two jonin whispering among themselves. They had respectfully backed away after burying Zabuza, and Kurenai had taken the time to pass all the information she had gotten from using the interrogation genjutsu on Haku.

Eventually they went silent, but lingered. As much as he didn't want to, he decided to get up, prompting the two to approach him.

"I understand that this is a difficult situation for you," Kurenai began, gently, "but we need to talk."

His guess had been correct.

"I have been told you know about our mission's true purpose," Kakashi said. There was something like sympathy in the man's one uncovered eye, and Haku couldn't maintain eye contact for long.

"Yes," Haku somehow found the energy to speak again, even if it was barely above a whisper. He remembered Kurenai's explanation, still in the illusory realm of a genjutsu, about Hiruzen Sarutobi's plan to undermine Yagura's rule by weakening his supply line. A classic war tactic, from what Haku had studied before Zabuza's failed coup.

The two jonin shared a look, and Kurenai spoke once again. "Do you... know what you'll be doing with your life from now on?"

That was an excellent question, and one Haku truly didn't want to think about. But he had no choice.

What path could he take now? He had joined Zabuza because the swordsman could make him strong enough to ensure his sister's protection. But now that both were dead... he had neither the purpose nor the way to continue living to depose Yagura, the Mizukage.

He could still pursue the rebels and join them, however. If he could spare at least one person from the suffering he and his sister had to go through when their father killed their mother before turning on them, it would still be a worthwhile goal. He knew Zabuza would've liked to see him pursue the dream he had failed to accomplish.

Still... Haru had always been against it. The girl had been tired of seeing them risk their lives so much, of the uncertainty of their lifestyle. Haku knew that, wherever she was, his sister would have hated to see him traveling down that road. Now, by himself, trying to join the rebels was too risky. He could very well die before he even got the chance to help anyone, and even then... the odds were stacked against the rebels.

In the Land of Waves, he had the perfect opportunity to settle down. Zabuza was the one with a bounty on his head, not him. He would be safe in this country. And staying close to where he could still visit Haru... as much as it would hurt each and every time, he knew that was something he would want, now that nothing could be done about it.

Now that he had failed.

...He eventually shook his head, signaling his answer to Kurenai.

"We will remain in this country until the bridge is repaired and fully completed," Kakashi continued. "If you feel like you still want to fight to change your country... come to us. I'm sure our Hokage can find a way to help you out. The kind of fight you will be getting into is not something you can handle by yourself."

"But take your time," Kurenai interrupted. "This will still take about a week so... think about it, okay?"

The rest of the conversation went by quickly. Instructions about where to find Tazuna's house... and a warning about how forgetting how Naruto had defeated him would be better for all involved.

Soon, the two jonin left him alone with his thoughts.

With the chilling wind as his only companion, the boy reached for a scroll in his pouch and stared at it. Within, was Zabuza's sword.

 _'What am I going to do now?'_

* * *

While the jonin were away, Tazuna had brought the genin to the local hospital.

Sasuke had awakened, yes, but he had suffered damage that required special attention and professional treatment beyond what Kurenai could manage, as she wasn't a specialized medic-nin. Kiba's shoulder and Akamaru's leg also had needed deeper examinations, and the minor wounds the group sustained were also patched up.

What made some of the genin suspicious was when they began to share their stories of the battle to Shino and Sakura. While Kiba painted a clear picture of his and Hinata's fight with Haru, Naruto had been surprisingly vague and evasive, much to Sasuke's vexing.

Hinata only had a foggy idea of why the Uzumaki was doing it and had the suspicion he wasn't lying entirely when he claimed he didn't remember the events very well. The bluenette was very confused by what she had witnessed after Kurenai rescued her, but seeing the worried glint in Naruto's eyes each time their eyes met as he fumbled for an explanation—almost as if expecting the one question he didn't know how to dodge—she hadn't the courage to make him more anxious.

But she still was very, very curious.

Later that day, after they all returned to Tazuna's house, Kakashi and Kurenai had pulled her aside and pressed her, correctly suspecting that she had witnessed Naruto making use of his bijuu's chakra. They offered little to no explanations to her own questions, and conflicting advice after stressing that keeping quiet about what she saw was of utmost importance.

"Just give him time," Kakashi said. "If he doesn't say anything, just return the favor. If he wants to tell you the truth, he will."

But once the Copy Ninja had retired to bathe, Kurenai gave her own suggestion.

"Listen, Hinata," the woman then crouched to her level. "Please, treat Naruto in the same way as you have done. If you do that, you might even be able to confront him about it. It won't be an easy conversation and you should indeed give him some space for a couple days at least... but I think there would be merit in seeking him out."

Kurenai's words and the events of the bridge, in general, kept floating around in Hinata's head throughout the following few days, feeding on the unease that she felt whenever Naruto was in the same room and her own nightmares. Still, the genjutsu lessons, spars and elemental training distracted Hinata when it was her turn to be on the bridge keeping an eye on Tazuna, as their contract had yet to be fulfilled.

What also helped Hinata to keep her mind clear was exploring the village during breaks.

For example, she and Sakura found a small bookstore in the one day they decided to eat out rather than bringing bentos. As they window-shopped, Sakura got the idea of gifting the still-bedridden Sasuke with a book, and Hinata scored quite a few points with her friend after suggesting a mystery novel.

The Uchiha wasn't known for his patience, but boredom caught up with him, and the book Sakura had bought soon became his newest best friend, to the girl's internal glee and to everyone else's relief—Sasuke had been in an insufferable mood ever since he woke up.

On the last day the two squads had spent in the Land of Waves, Hinata had used some of their free time before lunch to bring Shino to that same bookstore in order to buy some books.

Shino was carrying a small bag with their purchases, and Hinata had been surprised to discover that the Aburame was a huge fan of mystery novels like the one she had suggested for Sasuke. He had purchased the fifth volume of a series he particularly liked and was successfully trying to convince Hinata to start reading it while they made their way back to Tazuna's.

She was so focused on their conversation that only then she noticed they were already nearing the end of the wooden walkways that crossed the waters and led to the house.

"That's a really ingenious idea!" Hinata commented, awestruck, as she inspected the book's cover before returning it to Shino. "And you say the author managed to make interesting mysteries even with such a protagonist?"

"Indeed. While he can sense the emotions of the people around him, he doesn't have a mastery over that power. The idea allows him to analyze the other characters in a way you wouldn't expect from a first-person story, but his insights become muddy when he's around too many people," Shino clarified. There was a sparkle in his brown eyes, even though Hinata couldn't see it from behind his glasses. "And by the third volume he becomes quite famous for that ability, and thus, the suspects try to keep their emotions under control as well as other methods to mislead him such as—"

The Aburame was interrupted by a creaking sound followed by footsteps, which startled Hinata. She finally became aware of her surroundings and imagined the noise was from someone leaving the house.

"...I'm telling you, man. You heard it, didn't you?" That was Kiba's voice. Hinata and Shino shared a look, wondering what the context behind it was.

"Yeah... never thought I'd see Sakura-chan get angry at Sasuke like she does at me when I screw up, though." That was unmistakably Naruto, and Hinata tried to steel herself.

"Me neither. Glad I'm not on his shoes, though!" Kiba laughed as they rounded the corner and noticed his teammates.

"Oh, hey!" Kiba greeted them both with a wave of his good arm. The Inuzuka was just wearing a basic, sleeveless gray shirt instead of his usual coat ever since the battle, as it made dealing with the cast on his arm less of a hassle. "I didn't expect you guys would be back this soon."

Shino nodded to return the greeting. "The bookstore wasn't that far away from here," he said, before dropping his sight to Naruto's hands. "...Might I ask what those flowers are for, Naruto?"

"Oh, these?" Naruto raised the two white chrysanthemums for Shino to get a better look. "I was going to leave that on the hill. The graves, you know...?"

Hinata also took the chance to admire the pair of flowers, idly wondering where he'd found them.

"They are beautiful, Naruto-kun. I think they will like it," she smiled, looking up to Naruto.

The smile began to wilt when they made eye contact. The few times she had mustered the courage to talk with Naruto, he always had that same look from the bridge. A mixture of panic and fear that she couldn't understand why she would be the cause of.

Her gaze dropped to the floor, leaving an awkward silence to weight on the four kids until...

"I DON'T CARE THAT YOU AREN'T HUNGRY! YOU NEED TO EAT TO GET BETTER, AND _YOU WILL EAT!_ "

Hinata swore the house had rumbled with that outburst. _'Why is Sakura-san screaming?!'_

"...It looks like Sasuke is being difficult again," Shino stated after a moment of silence.

"Yeesh, looks like you were right," Naruto turned to Kiba, who was wincing from how loud Sakura had been to his ears. "Girls really are dangerous when they are on their perio— _mmhf!_ "

"Hey, shut up! Don't you have any common sense, you idiot?!" Kiba whispered as he clamped Naruto's mouth, but the blond quickly overpowered his grip when the Inuzuka saw Hinata glaring frigidly at him, as her father had unknowingly taught her.

Naruto noticed it as well, and took it as his cue to flee the scene. "Er... his words! Not mine! Okaygottagobye!"

"Hey, get back here! Traitor!" Kiba yelled at him, only to shrink as he continued to feel his only female teammate's disapproval. "Uh... hahahaha..."

"Really, Kiba-kun? Sakura-san has been having trouble sleeping these past few days," Hinata scowled, remembering her friend's off-hand complains about restless nights. "You shouldn't just assume this kind of thing about us girls! Sometimes it's just a bad day and nothing more."

"Yeah, maybe," he conceded, "but cramps and such probably aren't improving the pink-haired goddess of patience's mood."

"...You sound very convinced about that claim," Shino observed, warily.

"Well, you see... I, uh... girls kinda smell different to me that during that time of the month," he admitted, looking away. "You know, I _am_ an Inuzuka..."

Hinata's jaw almost hit the floor and her cheeks immediately became scarlet at the thought. "W-w-wait! So you... y-you know when...?!"

"Y-yeah. But don't worry, don't worry! I keep those things to myself," he promised Hinata with a thumbs-up... and she glared at him in return, now even harder than before.

"Then why were you disrespecting Sakura-san's privacy like that?! Naruto-kun is not an Inuzuka!"

"Hey, that was a last-case scenario! Lives were at risk!" Kiba swore, to Hinata and Shino's confusion. "He wanted to go talk to Sasuke and Sakura, and you heard what was going on! It was too dangerous!"

"...What you did was still wrong, Kiba-kun," Hinata lectured, sighing. "But... fine. I'll forget I heard this."

"Sorry..." Kiba apologized, ashamed. "But seriously, I couldn't help it. That kind of knowledge is what helped me stay alive all these years."

"You are exaggerating." Shino accused, but Kiba just laughed bitterly.

"You said the same thing when I told you how my sister and mom are, and I'll just repeat what I said then: I really wish I was. But, uh... Hinata...?"

Shino silently observed that Hinata had subconsciously assumed a defensive posture, with her arms protectively in front of her body. "...W-what is it?" the girl asked, unsure.

"Since we are already talking about all this uncomfortable stuff anyways and probably will never ever do this again and just to be safe..." Kiba shifted around uneasily. "You, uh, you're not the kind that flips out for no reason and/or starts hurling things at people, right?"

Hinata considered the question for a second. Memories of a certain incident flooded her mind and then... she started _giggling._

"Yes!" she managed between giggles, which then became full-on laughter when Kiba very noticeably blanched.

"..."

"...I think you broke him," Shino commented to Hinata, holding back a laugh as well but keeping his voice and expression perfectly even. "You shouldn't lie to him like that."

That just made her laugh even harder.

"Wait," Kiba's system rebooted. "She's lying?! How can you tell?"

The Aburame raised an eyebrow at the obvious question. "Do you think she would be happy about that?"

"...Hey, that's true!"

Kiba then bared his teeth to the girl, growling... until he couldn't resist her laughter and joined in. Even Shino had a minuscule smirk behind his collar!

"Dammit, you got me there!" The Inuzuka wiped a tear from his eyes. "That was mean. Didn't expect a cheap shot from such a prim and proper girl like you!"

"Sorry!" Hinata spoke giddily, trying to calm herself with a deep breath. "Y-you just reminded me of a conversation I had with my sister once. I couldn't help it!"

"So I was the victim of an inside joke?"

Hinata nodded to her wounded teammate. "But... I wasn't lying. Technically."

"Eh?"

"If "people" includes myself," she began, swallowing a giggle at the memory of Hanabi's indignant pout, "then the way I consume sweets during those days definitely counts as throwing things."

"Eh," Kiba shrugged. "Worst-case scenario, a cinnamon roll probably hurts less than a chair. Or a ceiling fan."

Hinata's shock gave her pause, allowing her to cool down and feel embarrassed by the topic again. But since they already were talking about _that_...

"Um, w-well... I-I might start crying for practically no reason," she warned him.

This time it was Shino who spoke. "No reason?"

Hinata fiddled with her pointer fingers. "There was a time I cried because there was a shoyu stain on my kimono, for example, and another because I saw a cockroach flipped over in the compound's back gardens."

"Poor thing," Shino mourned. Hinata didn't notice he was talking about the cockroach.

What she did notice, was that Kiba now wore a decidedly evil smirk on his face. With his safety assured, it was time for his revenge!

"You know... my nose works for many other things as well," he pointed at Hinata, who took a step back. "And I wasn't trying to do this or anything, but yesterday I went to the room you girls sleep in, and there was a certain someone's smell in a second someone's bag, and saw a certain something hanging out from that second someone's bag...!"

Now it was the girl's turn to blanch. She had been too careless! "Y-y-you mean...?!"

"Naruto won't be happy when I tell him about it. Didn't take you for a thief, you know?" Kiba smiled cheekily.

"What does Naruto have to do with this?" Shino asked, confused. To his vexing, the question was completely ignored.

"Y-y-you wouldn't!" Hinata started to freak out. "Kiba-kun, you can't do that!"

"Oh, but I can... and maybe I will," Kiba teased her further.

Suddenly panic flashed across Hinata's features and she pointed to somewhere behind Kiba. "L-look! A-a shark!"

"A _shark_?! Where?!" Kiba whirled around, frantically searching for the marine menace on the sea... but when he felt a hand firmly grasping his wounded shoulder, just strong enough to not cause him pain _yet_ , he knew that the true menace was right behind him.

"Will you, Kiba-kun?"

"...I-I was just kiddin'!" Kiba laughed nervously. The pressure on his shoulder ceased, and he heaved a sigh of relief.

When he turned back to face his teammates, he saw Shino shaking his head and Hinata smiling innocently, trying not to laugh again. "Sheesh, you've been spending way too much time around Sakura lately, you know that?"

"Sorry."

"You're not sorry at all!"

"...M-maybe."

"I still don't understand what you two are talking about," Shino reminded them he was standing right there.

"Don't worry about it, man. Nothing to do with you," Kiba waved him off, to the Aburame's annoyance. "But seriously Hinata, what are you doing with _that_?"

"...I was going to clean it, fix it and... return it," she explained, weakly. "Eventually."

"With the way you two are acting around each other? Really?" Kiba quirked an eyebrow. "Yeah, not seeing it."

Hinata sighed. Her plan of bundling it with a letter and leaving the two things on Naruto's doorstep accounted for it. If you are cowardly enough, there's always a workaround.

"For that matter..." Shino spoke up, "I would say you and Naruto need to come to terms with whatever happened to cause so much tension whenever you are in close proximity to each other, as we saw just minutes ago."

"B-but... I know. I know that! I-I just don't know _how!_ " she snapped, startling both Kiba and Shino. "I try to start a conversation, but... b-but I'm not good at it! And he avoids me when I try and, and I don't even know what the p-problem _is_!"

"Then tell him what you just said here!" Kiba shot back. "Look, Hinata, Naruto is not the kind of guy that runs away from stuff, so there's something really wrong going on. And he's not the sharpest kunai in the pouch either—let me finish," he shushed her with a finger, "you need to be direct with him, or nothing happens. I get that you like him and all of that, but you won't get anywhere with him like this."

Letting out a small whimper—Sakura had already told her something like that, hadn't she?—the girl continued to fidget.

Shino placed a hand on her shoulder and added his opinion. "Hinata, I understand that your introverted nature and your anxiety, among other issues, can make socializing with others a difficult task. But think of it like this: we are all part of the Sandaime Hokage's attempt at reforming the academy's teachings, correct?"

The girl nodded, offering him a small smile as thanks for the understanding.

"The possibility of missions where you and Naruto are together, from now on, are high. And this is not limited to our teams," he motioned to himself and Kiba. "With a smaller squad, these... unresolved matters between you two could get in the way, and potentially even lead to deaths."

She gulped.

"And... perhaps the key to your conversation might be what happened on the bridge."

"What does the bridge have to do with any of this?" Kiba inquired, noticing Hinata becoming more nervous.

"Naruto's wounds mysteriously healed before anyone could tend to him... and that surge of killing intent, that definitely wasn't from Zabuza, caused him to behave suspiciously when it became the topic of our conversation at the hospital," he explained.

"S-so what?" Kakashi and Kurenai's words echoed in Hinata's mind as she bit her lip.

Shino removed his hand from her shoulder. "...I trust you when you claim to not understand what is going wrong. But you know those things are in a way related to how he avoids you, do you not?"

There was a long, pregnant pause before Hinata admitted it with a simple nod.

"Oh yeah, I remember that!" Kiba exclaimed. "Sasuke was really upset that Naruto was as banged up as him but ended up winning his fight against that masked guy anyways."

Shino watched Hinata fidget as the words left Kiba's mouth. "Do you know anything about that, Hinata?"

"...Not enough," she ultimately confessed. "But... but I'm not allowed to say anything."

"Not allowed?" Kiba parroted. "Wait, Kurenai-sensei or Kakashi-sensei forbid you from talking about it?"

The girl sighed, and once again nodded. "S-sorry. I—"

"Don't be," Shino cut her off. "They have kept many secrets about this mission. Between the training we received before the mission and the excessive defensive measures to protect Tazuna-san from just a possible bandit attack... and the kind of influence Gatou had in this country, which practically borders ours, clearly there was more to this mission than we have been told."

"Yeah, I thought that setup with Naruto's clones was way too much back then, "Kiba mused, scratching his chin. "Kurenai-sensei was kinda tense on the last day we had a Team 8 training moment, now that I think about. She pushed us way harder than before, and it seems she did the same for Team 7 on the next day too."

"I... didn't even notice most of that," Hinata confessed, feeling stupid.

"Well, with that whole duel with your sister thingy you spoke about the other day, I don't blame you," Kiba shrugged, and regretted it when his shoulder protested. "Dammit, whatever. They won't tell us anything, so screw it. We're done," he closed that conversation. "But I think you need to talk with Naruto too. It's been more than a week, for goodness's sake."

Hinata looked down. "I know... but I don't know if I can. W-what if I—"

"Nope! No what ifs! Come on, you're overthinking it!" Kiba lifted her chin with his good hand, forcing her to make eye contact. "If you tell yourself "I can!" then you can! Just believe in yourself a little, Hinata!"

"Somehow, Kiba is right."

"Hey! What's that supposed to mean?!"

Shino ignored him and faced Hinata. "Both of you told me about your fight at the bridge. If you are capable of going through that, you can face this challenge."

"Hmph..." Kiba grunted. "Mr. Know-it-All is right, you know?"

Hinata gaped, speechless. They actually _believed_ in her, and the thought that someone actually did was almost overwhelming to the girl, so used to be put down by her failures.

"...Look, Hinata," the Inuzuka's expression softened, "you got knocked down by that girl and she was instants away from killing you, but still found a way to reverse that situation at the last second! That was amazing, and I know I'd have given up the moment I fell flat on my butt and had an Ice pole pointed at my head, and so would many others."

"I did not witness that fight," Shino conceded, "but I know that if you didn't believe in yourself in that moment, the outcome would've been drastically different."

Hinata realized that they must have been speaking the truth; she had not doubted her abilities then—she just acted. _'Could that be the key? Just... believing?'_

A small bug suddenly began to hover above her nose, startling the girl.

"This will lead you to Naruto, if you want to chase after him," Shino explained.

Hinata still wasn't so sure about this whole "believe in yourself" thing. Perhaps she would never be. But if her teammates believed in her, she could at least believe in their judgment.

"Thank you. Both of you. This... it means a lot to me!" Hinata smiled brightly at them, even going as far as to bow to them, to Kiba's embarrassment.

The little bug then took off to avoid what for it was a headbutt, and Hinata hurried to follow it.

Once she was far enough, Kiba faked a sob. "Oh, they grow up so fast...!"

Shino just sighed, taking the moment to push up his glasses. The conversation had drained him, just as he was sure it did for their equally introverted teammate. He then raised both eyebrows in surprise when Kiba raised his hand, palm facing forward.

"We did a good job, huh?"

"...Indeed." They high-fived. "Now we just have to wait."

* * *

The two moved back inside the house to find Tazuna, Inari and Tsumani n the living room, chatting.

Inari didn't look very happy. "Do they really have to leave?" he pouted, glaring at the backpacks scattered near the stairs.

Tsunami crouched to her son's height, giving him a comforting smile. "Dear, they need to go back to their homes. But now that the bridge is finally finished, you could always send them letters!"

"But it's a shame those kids will be gone, eh?" Tazuna, who was sprawled on the sofa, smiled melancholically. "It's been ages since I've seen such a lively house!"

"Yes, it's a pity," Tsunami agreed. But she certainly wouldn't miss having to wake up at five in the morning just to make sure everything would be done by the end of the day. Even with some of the ninjas helping, there were still a _lot_ of chores left in the wake of having eleven people and a dog in the same house.

Kiba saw the chance to enter the conversation. "Cheer up, Inari! You could always drop by our village too! There's lots of stuff to see!"

"Really?" the little boy whirled around, stars in his eyes.

"Konoha is a surprisingly popular tourist location, despite being a hidden village," Shino added as Kiba nodded to Inari. Before that conversation could continue, however...

"What are you two brats doing here?" Tazuna questioned.

"Excuse me?" Kiba raised an eyebrow as he entered the house, with Shino closing it after following suit.

"Father, could you try to be any ruder?" Tsunami glared at Tazuna before turning to the two genin. "What he means is that both of you left with someone else."

"And not even that long ago in your case," the old bridge builder pointed to Kiba. "Weren't you going to bring Naruto to where your teachers buried that assassin and the girl?"

"Oh... I-I was, wasn't I?" Kiba gulped. ' _Well... gotta hope Naruto remembers the direction Kakashi-sensei gave us...'_

The Inuzuka then felt Shino's reproving glare. "Kiba, don't tell me that—"

The doorbell rang.

"Hm? I wonder who it is..." Tsunami mused as she got up and went to open the door, leaving Shino to sigh as he was once again unceremoniously tossed to the background.

She opened the door, revealing an individual dressed in a simple light blue yukata and with a big backpack slung across his shoulder

"Hello?" Tsunami said innocently.

"Wait, what?!" Kiba dashed over to the door to see if his nose wasn't playing tricks on him. "You... you're that guy from the bridge!"

"Haku," he corrected the genin, as he bowed. "Haku Yuki. I apologize for the intrusion, but may I speak with Kakashi-san and Kurenai-san? I... have to discuss something with them."

"Um... of course!" Tsunami smiled at him, shakily, as she motioned for him to enter. "Please make yourself at home..."

"What the hell are you doing here, kid?" Tazuna blurted out curiously, ignoring the glare he knew his daughter was sending him as Haku approached them.

"Are you after my grandpa again?" Inari angrily stomped towards the older boy. "Because if you are, you'll have to go through me first!" he yelled, hoping that his volume would draw Kakashi and Kurenai's attention, as the two were upstairs, busy writing out their ridiculously long mission report.

"Oh no," Haku paled. "Please, that's not it! I'm not after your grandfather."

"Don't worry, kid," Kiba patted Inari's head. "This guy doesn't have a beef with us anymore, right?"

"It is as he says, Inari," a new voice joined them. Turning around, the group saw Kurenai walking down the stairs, with Kakashi following right behind her with his head buried in his favorite adult novel.

"So, do you have an answer?" Kakashi inquired, pausing his reading to spare Haku a glance.

"Yes," the Ice-user nodded. "I've thought about your offer and... I realized that you were right."

"Right about what?" Kiba inquired nosily, not being able to hold himself back.

"I have something I still need to accomplish," Haku faced him, resolute. "But I can't do it alone... I need help. And the only person that could provide me this help is—"

"Our Hokage," Shino interrupted him. "Isn't that correct?"

Kiba just rolled his eyes _. 'Smartass. There's no way—'_

"Yes! It will only be for a small while, but I plan on going to Konohagakure with you."

Kiba slowly turned to his teammate. "...Shino?"

"What is it, Kiba?"

"I hate you."

* * *

Hinata couldn't believe she had been stupid enough to make the same mistake again.

She knew fully well how bad she usually was at talking with people. If she needed to talk with someone extroverted or that she was at least comfortable around, she trusted them to help move the conversation along and that usually was enough. But when talking with the opposite kind of people, Hinata knew that having a plan before the conversation was crucial.

Not doing that planning almost blew up her attempt to get info on Sasuke almost two weeks before, and it had made her impulsive decision to talk to Inari after his fight with Naruto difficult. Now it might just be her downfall.

The situation was both a little better and a little worse than before, though.

On one hand, she had noticed this flaw a little before making herself known to Naruto and actually knew what she needed to talk about in a broad way, but on the other hand, she didn't know how and when to bring up each topic. Worse: she didn't know whether to go for the important stuff straight away of try making some small talk first. The latter would be extremely problematic in its own way, too...

Usually, this wouldn't be much of an issue. Even though Naruto intimidated her in some ways, he was very talkative and could get the conversation going easily on his own, like he had done thrice already. But... considering the way Naruto had practically ran away from her, she couldn't rely on his usually sunny personality as a crutch.

Her Byakugan had told Hinata that Naruto had yet to move away from the two graves, but he wasn't on her normal sights just yet. The bug Shino lent her had left already, and it was simply up to her to take a step forward.

 _'No, I can't overthink this!'_ she decided. Doing that would just give more time for that little voice inside her head to convince her this was a lost cause and she should just run away. Kiba and Shino's words of encouragement were still louder on her mind than her fears. _'I can do this!'_

Hinata deactivated her dojutsu and moved out of her hiding spot, maneuvering between trees and bushes for a minute until Naruto's back came into view, with the bridge appearing farther ahead across the ocean. The boy was talking to one of the graves, and, not wanting to intrude until he was done, Hinata used a nearby tree meters away from him for cover until he was done. (Old habits die hard, as they say.)

There were two wooden crosses looming over the actual graves and Hinata had barely noticed the pair of chrysanthemums he had left beside the crosses when the shorter distance between them allowed her to overhear what he was saying.

"—end, I guess saying sorry doesn't matter, huh?"

Naruto's voice was heavy with sadness and guilt, which made it harder for Hinata to overhear him. Still... she had to focus on that, or else she'd be alone with her own thoughts.

"But I still really wanted to apologize," he continued, forlornly. "If I had been stronger, if I hadn't lost control and let that fox mess everything up... I dunno. Maybe you wouldn't be here right now."

 _'...Fox? Lost control?'_

"But then again, it's been, like, a month since I found out the truth. I guess I should've asked the old man about my seal instead of fooling around with my ninja registry photo, hehehe..."

While Naruto smiled a bit at his "amazing" photo, which he had taken about an hour before his first encounter with Konohamaru... Hinata only felt more confused, as she now held more pieces of the puzzle in her hands and had no idea what they meant.

Her head lowered, taking Naruto out of her eyesight as she mulled over the clues. 'I _suppose the "old man" is Hokage-sama... maybe?'_

"I guess I should be going, though. It's almost time for lunch and I still haven't packed and..."

Lost in thought, Hinata failed to hear Naruto's parting words.

' _But what is this about a truth and a... seal? Is he talking about fuuinjutsu?'_

A gasp startled her. When Hinata looked forward again, Naruto was staring right back.

"Hin... Hinata?!"

Yelping, she tried to get behind the tree again, but her legs refused to cooperate.

"What are you doing there?" Naruto questioned reflexively, and then it dawned on him. "Wait... y-you didn't hear anything, did you?!"

Repressing the sudden urge to hunt for an escape route, Hinata gulped. Being caught off-guard left her speechless, but she managed a little nod anyways.

Naruto didn't like that answer. Before he knew it, his hands were already making a big mess out of his blond spikes. "Gnngh... you weren't supposed to be here...! Why _are_ you here?!"

Seeing him so upset Hinata was inclined to agree. _'This was a bad idea... I shouldn't have come here!'_

But then she remembered.

Kiba, Kurenai, Shino, Sakura, Kakashi... all of them, in their own ways, had helped her gather the courage to go through with this and everything she had accomplished in these past few days. Before them, there had been only one person, guiding her from afar without even being aware of the influence he had.

Despite all of her fears, Hinata had always felt like she could have done something for him. She could _do_ something for him! His secret quite obviously revolved around why the people on the Leaf hated his guts so much, and if she were to run away now... Hinata knew that the key to repaying Naruto for everything he had done would be lost. Perhaps even forever.

Her eyes, briefly, fell to the graves and the white chrysanthemum flowers. She refused to let that regret be buried with her one day. She was sure Naruto hadn't brought those flowers because of that, but Hinata wanted to live up to their meaning

 _'No... I can do this!'_

...The first step was the hardest one. To leave that tree behind and have nothing to shield her from whatever was up ahead was terrifying. But, determined, she walked out of hiding and stood in front of Naruto much like she had before when they sparred on Training Ground 3.

"Naruto-kun... I think—" She stopped herself mid-sentence and closed her eyes for two whole seconds to steady her breathing, and when she reopened them, Naruto saw that fire weaved in the lavender of her orbs. "No. We _need_ to talk."

He, still nervous, stared at her for a few more seconds, trying to replicate that repulsive effect he knew he had on her. But she didn't back down.

His shoulders sagged with a weary sigh. "You... want to talk? A-about what?"

"...You know what," she accused, slightly miffed. Despite behaving out-of-character lately, Hinata didn't expect him to resort to that

And she was right: he knew. Kakashi had even been kind enough to warn him of the possibility Hinata would confront him about it, which he had never seriously entertained because of her unbelligerent nature. He had, instead, focused on the one tip his sensei had given him:

 _"You might want to tell her the truth yourself, though. It's in your hands, but... if I were you, I would."_

The problem? Hinata was still a complete mystery to him.

The mere thought that the fox had gotten in the way of forming a friendship with someone else had made him so angry that he didn't even give a chance for Hinata to try explaining things. But when that fury wavered and he thought some more about it, there were so many doubts... and one certainty: he had shunned her without understanding her.

He was intimately acquainted with that sort of mistreatment, but Naruto never thought he'd be on the other side of that equation.

Shame was added to the confusion he felt, and it became even worse once after the bridge incident happened. Hinata didn't run away from him, and in fact sought him out at points, acting like she had never seen anything and had nothing to question.

It put Naruto on the edge like nothing else had.

He had forged bonds with his teammates, Kiba, Inari, and to a lesser extent even Tazuna and Shino, who accepted him to a degree. But Hinata's presence meant she could suddenly ruin all of that and send him right back to that stage of unacceptance and hatred that had almost consumed him before.

Or at least it meant that in his mind. She couldn't do much without the whole story, but Naruto couldn't see it. And so he began to avoid her, simply because he had no idea of how to possibly deal with this grave situation that couldn't be solved with fists or any of the ways he usually dealt with his problems.

Her actions threw him off before and after the incident. He didn't know if he could trust the girl with his secret, and there was nothing he could do to make sure she'd stay silent about it.

"Naruto-kun?" Hinata prompted him again. Naruto noted that she was looking at him as if she was _worried._ Even though she was clearly becoming a bit frustrated with the silence—an irony neither failed to spot—the worry showed clearly in her expression. Her eyes were still burning with something he couldn't quite put his finger on.

They eased him into it.

"If... alright," he conceded, cautiously. "I'll tell you, but... you need to promise that you won't tell this to anyone, okay?"

She nodded eagerly, and Naruto wanted to kick himself because _now_ he knew how to keep her quiet for sure.

"Look, I'm serious! The old man—I mean, the Third," he corrected himself, "he made a law about this. If you talk about this, you'll be in hot water. Like, volcano-hot!"

Hinata frowned slightly. _'So Hokage-sama really is involved...'_

Naruto took a deep breath and began his tale. One that started on the day he was born...

"So... how much do you know about the Kyuubi's attack around thirteen years ago?"

* * *

"Um..." Naruto trailed off uneasily. Hinata spacing out was not what he was expecting to happen, but then again, he consistently failed in predicting her.

He had just shared the whole story about him being a jinchuuriki, and what was behind his transformation on the bridge, but... Hinata had barely reacted. She had muffled a gasp of shock with her hand early in the conversation, and that hand was still hovering in front of her mouth. Her gaze was focused on a random patch of nothing to Naruto's left.

She hadn't moved since, and he was becoming worried. "Hinata...? Are you even listening?"

Hinata actually wasn't. The moment Naruto mentioned that the Kyuubi was too powerful to be destroyed, and needed to be sealed, was when all the pieces began to neatly fit together. Between her observations from the past few years and what she had just overheard... everything finally made sense.

Completely. She didn't even need Naruto's explanation to connect the remaining dots.

"Hey, Hinata!" he called her again, louder... and cursed under his breath when he saw her shoulder and fists trembling and her eyes narrowing dangerously.

What had he done...?!

"So t-this... _this_ is the reason? "A-are you kidding me?!" she cried out, literally. Tears began to flow freely down her face, and Hinata suddenly felt the world around her expanding on its own and had to make a conscious effort to force her Byakugan to deactivate.

Naruto had to take some steps back when he saw her dojutsu. _'Oh shit. Shit! This was a bad idea, a really bad idea!'_

He knew where this was going. Undoubtedly, the fox sealed in his stomach had killed a bunch of her clansmen, or even possibly someone important to her like a sibling or parent. Between the raw emotion in her voice and the change in her posture—from guarded to aggressive—he wouldn't be surprised if she suddenly dived in to attack him and...

"This is the reason our whole village treats you like trash?! Because, because of something you never even had a ch-choice on?!"

...Naruto really should've known better than to try and predict Hinata by that point. He stared at the fuming, crying girl and his brain scrambled to keep up.

 _'She's so angry but... not with me? But why?!'_

Hinata's words died out between sobs. She tried to wipe her tears with her sleeve but they just kept coming back and she couldn't stop crying, and Naruto knew that she needed to control herself before they could continue. Before he could get answers.

"Look," he slowly approached the girl, motioning for her to calm down, "I get that you're angry but... it's fine, rea—"

"I-It's not!" she loudly cut him off. "Don't you see it!? They, they act like you were some sort of evil monster when you aren't! They have no right to do that! You're human! Y-you're just a child, not the fox! It's horrible. It's unfair! It's _s-stupid!_ "

Hinata turned away and glared at the ground, trying to gather herself. The situation reminded her far, far too much of the way some of her main house clansmen treated those of the branch house, which only made her feel even angrier about... everything! Nobody had the right to treat someone else like that.

She had always given the village the benefit of doubt. That maybe, just maybe, they had a good reason, but... _'This is so wrong!'_

Naruto let the silence hang for a moment. There was even _more_ he couldn't process but, again, he needed the shy and gentle Hinata back before he could go anywhere.

"You know... I... understand what you're saying," he began, averting his gaze to the nearby graves. "I... don't think it's right either. But life... it's not always fair."

The truth in Naruto's words was a bitter pill to swallow, Hinata realized.

"I know. I know, it's just..." she sighed, closing her eyes. Her head was pounding again.

"But seriously," he continued. "I wasn't kidding! Like, what does it matter what they think now?"

Incredulous, Hinata whirled around only to find Naruto smiling. And to her big surprise, it wasn't a fake smile just to try to make her feel better. It was genuine.

"I'll definitively become Hokage one day anyways! They will see me differently by the time I get that hat, you'll see!"

The confidence and determination behind his words and his smile that had always drawn her to him were just as strong as always, and Hinata found herself shakily smiling back as she dried the last tears that stained her flushed face.

"Yes... yes, you're right. You're absolutely right," she agreed; temper subsiding. She didn't know how and when, but she was sure that day would eventually come.

Naruto picked up on that sincerity behind her words, which, once again, puzzled him to no end. However, seeing as Hinata had calmed herself, to a degree, he decided he had waited long enough.

"Hey... I, uh, wanna ask you something too."

Hinata had an idea of where this would go. It was only fair, she knew, and that was part of why she even came to him anyways, but... as her anger vanished, she realized that so did much of her energy.

"Can... can you give me a moment first?"

"Oh. Um... sure! Maybe you should sit somewhere?" Naruto started to look around until he pointed to a random tree. "How about there?"

Silently, the girl accepted the suggestion and made her way to the small tree and the pocket of shade that surrounding it. The conversation with her teammates and with Naruto had drained her, and she needed to rest a little before continuing.

Hinata sat by the tree's roots, using the thin trunk to support her back while she hugged her legs, resting her head on her knees. Her lavender eyes closed for a moment, and she only knew that Naruto was sitting down by a nearby tree beside her because he wasn't trying to be subtle.

 _'Good,'_ she thought. _'At least, I can do this without needing to look at him. It'll be easier that way.'_

Naruto, meanwhile, simply decided to stop thinking. He only had questions, and she'd answer those anyways—hopefully—so why bother? Instead, he just daydreamed while he watched the empty bridge. Tazuna wanted his escorts to be the first people to cross the bridge, so the structure was blocked off until then, despite being completed.

A couple minutes passed with only the wind and the occasional bird that flew by to break their silence, and Naruto's eyes slowly closed... he relaxed...

...

* * *

"Um...Naruto-kun?"

"Huh? What?! What?!" he looked around in a panic until his gaze settled on Hinata. She was looking with the weirdest expression, as if...

He frowned at her. "I wasn't asleep."

"I didn't say you were," she said, and her lips curled awkwardly in a restrained smile.

"Good, because I wasn't. Just so you know," he huffed, making the girl bury her face on her knees again. She was silent, but her quaking shoulders betrayed her laughter.

When it ceased, Hinata took a deep breath and raised her head, turning it to look at Naruto. "What... exactly do you want to know?" she asked, hoping that he'd give her somewhere to start with.

"I... I dunno," he admitted, unknowingly making Hinata panic on the inside. "I don't get it. I don't get _you._ I just told you that I have the freaking Kyuubi inside me, and you didn't insult me or ran away or, or did anything that I actually thought you would!" he gesticulated wildly. "You didn't even tell the others about the bridge even though they were asking me questions back at the hospital and... you seem to know a lot more about me than I know about you, even though we never even spoke to each other before this mission came up..."

"... I see." Hinata smiled slightly. Despite his first words, he did give her the key to take the first step. "So you really don't remember after all."

"Remember what?" Naruto looked back at her, only to find she, too, was focusing on the bridge.

But for Hinata, the bridge wasn't there anymore. All she saw was a forest covered by snow...

"Six years ago, on the day of the Rinne Festival... I was walking around the village to see the sights, alone. I eventually felt like playing around in the snow, but there were too many people around so I... ran into a little road that leads to the academy and began to play all by myself. Or... at least that was the case until three boys found me."

Naruto silently wondered what the hell that had to do with him.

"They started to pick on me because I was a Hyuuga and laugh at me because I had weird eyes, and I had no idea what to do and they kept insulting me and laughing, so... I just broke down and started to cry. But then... that's when another boy showed up. He confronted the bullies because he didn't like what they were doing, but the three bullies had no idea who the boy was. He said his name... and said that, one day, he would become Hokage."

 _'Wait. Hokage...?'_

Hinata continued before Naruto could figure it out. "But this boy was just around my age, and the other three were a bit older and much stronger. They laughed at him too, and he actually managed to drive them away, but... only because they beat him up until they got bored, and then left. But not before destroying the red scarf the boy had been wearing."

"No... no way! A red scarf?!" Naruto got up in a hurry, angered. "Hey, I remember those bastards! And... wait, you mean...? T-that was _you_?!" he pointed at Hinata, unnecessarily.

The Hyuuga just nodded, struggling not to laugh at his flabbergasted expression.

Defeated, Naruto groaned as he slumped against the tree until he was sitting on the ground again. "Now I remember why I _didn't_ remember that day..." he grumbled. "What a coincidence..."

"Isn't it? And... you ended up forgetting that day" she continued, "but I never forgot it. It is a very important memory to me."

"Because... I saved you?" he tried. To his complete surprise—again, not that he should've expected to be right—she shook her head.

"Because you smiled," she corrected, her expression brightly mirroring her words. "Even though those three mocked you and laughed at your dream... even though you got hurt and your scarf was ruined, you still had the strength to smile at me before you left and you didn't even cry!"

Naruto didn't have the courage to say that was the first thing he did when he locked himself inside his apartment.

"You showed me that you could keep going despite everything that went wrong," she proceeded. "That no matter how many people insult you, no matter how many people tell you that you can't or that you should give up, no matter how much they beat you up... it is _possible_ to continue. This lesson you taught me... it was very, very important to me."

Naruto stared at Hinata with wide eyes, completely speechless. He had never imagined he could have such an impact on someone, and at such a young age no less! But... that last sentence she spoke also made him become worried. When she finished speaking, Hinata's smile had faded and her mood reversed completely.

"I'm the first-born of the Head of my clan, so I'm the heiress. But I never lived up to that title," she admitted with a pained tone. "I trained and trained, but I was always too weak and too unskilled to be the heiress. Always a failure. But I thought, "If Naruto-kun can still continue after everything he went through, I can continue too!" and..." she gulped. "There were many times where clinging to that idea was the only thing that kept me going..."

As she trailed off into silence, Naruto saw a window to speak."...I get the feeling you don't even want to be a ninja in the first place. I mean, no offense, but that's the impression I got."

He, personally, clung to the idea of becoming Hokage to give him motivation not... simply because he refused to give up. Not giving up for the sake of not giving up just seemed like idiocy to him.

Her reply was a small sigh. "I don't. I never did, but... I wanted to be the head of my clan one day."

"Like how I wanna become Hokage?" he interrupted her, drawing her gaze.

"Well, yes... but no. I'm not doing for the same reasons. There are... things," she hesitated, looking away, "that I wanted to change for my clan. To become the head, I needed to be a jonin and meet various others requirements."

"...Wait. "Wanted"? You don't want it anymore?" he questioned with a tilted head.

"I... it's complicated. A-and, anyways, this doesn't answer your questions, right?" she changed the subject. It was completely futile, but even though she'd be in Konoha by the end of the day, she still wanted to run away from the thought of what awaited her at home.

"Well, kinda." Naruto shrugged, thrown off by the mysteriously depressive note her story had ended on.

"So... you see, I was really happy when I enrolled in the academy and found out we'd be in the same class. I wanted to thank you for saving me on that day and helping me but... I... to me, talking to other people is... difficult. When I was younger it was even worse, if you can believe that, and I ended up not trying to talk to you because I was scared of what you'd think of me..."

"...Huh? Scared?! But... why?" The confusion, Naruto's old and annoying friend, returned.

"For almost the same reason you've been avoiding me," she answered without missing a beat, as her gaze focused on the bridge again. "Except that... you were scared because I saw what you wanted to hide. I was afraid that you'd find out what _I_ kept hiding... that, maybe if I tried to be your friend, you'd see I was weak and useless like everyone else says and wouldn't want anything to do with me."

"Hold on! I... that's not exactly it," he argued. "What really... bothered me, was that you could've told what you saw to the others. Sakura-chan, Sasuke, Kiba... I... I feel like I'm making real friendships with them," he confessed, looking down at the grass. "But if they knew about the fox..."

"But didn't you say—"

"I forgot about the law until, like, now."

She shook her head, briefly amused, and moved on. "Perhaps there was more at stake for you, yes... but, you don't understand." Naruto looked up and saw that Hinata was blushing as she forced herself to make eye contact.

"To me, Naruto-kun... y-you... you are a hero."

His jaw fell to the floor before he ever had a chance to catch it.

"A...a hero? Me?!" Naruto pointed at himself, and, timidly, Hinata bobbed her head, and she didn't seem to be lying.

 _'Wow... a hero! This is so cool!'_

He never thought someone would call him something as noble as a "hero". It felt simply amazing to be so highly regarded by someone else! (There was a small blush of embarrassment at how badly his voice had cracked back there, too...)

But it also put Hinata's account into perspective. _'I mean, if the Fourth Hokage suddenly showed up from the dead and said that I was a loser and that I'd never be a Hokage or something... no, wait, bad example.'_ He'd probably end up trying to punch the guy in the gut for giving him the worst birthday present in the history of birthday presents, in that case.

"I think... I think I get it now," he muttered. _'A hero, huh?'_

Hinata glanced at him. Naruto was looking up at the sky, with a huge smile plastered in his face. It made her smile a little too, and she allowed him to enjoy the moment for a bit. It was a moment Naruto spent basking in that surge of emotions, rather than trying to rationalize it.

But she had yet to finish, and what she had to say next made her cheeks flush considerably. "So... b-because I was scared of trying to talk with you, I... uh, found other ways to know you better."

Naruto had a bad feeling about that one. "...What do you mean?"

Hinata barely noticed she was playing with her fingers again. "I... f-f-followed you around the village, sometimes..."

He suddenly felt _very_ uncomfortable. "...You were stalking me?"

She frowned at that, though her scarlet blush persisted. "I-I have never used the Byakugan to spy on you. So no." Present day notwithstanding, of course.

"Um..." Naruto backed off, feeling like pressing further would be dangerous. _'Whatever floats her boat, I guess...?'_

"And since I did that, _sometimes_ ," she took the time to stress that last word. "I... I ended up seeing things."

Her expression darkened, and that clued him on what she was implying. "You saw how they treated me, huh?"

"I did," she scowled. "But I didn't understand why, even after you began to prank them in retaliation. I'd understand if they were simply annoyed with you in that case, but... "

Naruto idly wondered what that "retaliation" meant, but kept quiet.

"I saw you being kicked out of the library right after you entered once, and people refusing to sell you things even when you tried to pay more for them. I saw when parents stopped their kids from playing with you and sometimes even goaded their kids into insulting you..." Naruto noticed her clenched fists. "I asked some people in my clan about it, but they only told me to stay away from you. That you were..."

Hinata looked down, fidgeting, and her pause was too long for Naruto's patience. "I was what?"

"Dan...dangerous."

A heavy silence hung in the air after that word was said.

Hinata didn't know what exactly to say after that. Naruto... knew. But it took him a while to find the courage to actually voice what he thought.

"And... don't you agree with them? After everything I told you and... what you saw while we were on the bridge, don't you think—"

"No."

Naruto's question died in his mouth and he almost choked. "No?"

Hinata reaffirmed her answer with a head shake, but Naruto couldn't accept that.

"Wait, what do you mean "no"?! You saw my fight with her!" he motioned to Haru's grave. "And, and her brother was way stronger and I almost killed him after I thought he killed Sasuke and the Kyuubi took over! Why would even say something like that?!"

It pained Hinata to see his outburst. He looked scared... _vulnerable_ , and she had to pause to order her thoughts before risking an answer. It was her time to help him, as he had done for so long.

"Please... listen to yourself, Naruto-kun. You just told me! The Kyuubi is dangerous, not you!"

"But, but even so!" he insisted. "That power took control of my body before I even knew what was going on! What if it happens again?!"

"It could happen again, yes," she conceded. "But... you will find a way to control that power instead of letting it control you. I know it!"

No matter how much he searched, there wasn't a trace of uncertainty in Hinata's face. Naruto didn't know why he was even trying to convince her, after all that was already said but...

"How... no, why? Why are you so sure about that?"

The first part of Hinata's reply was a smile. Her hand then slowly moved up until it was level with her forehead, and with her pointer, she silently tapped at it twice, right in the middle.

"Uh, what? Is there something on my..."

He reached out to mirror her, and his finger brushed by the Leaf village's symbol emblazoned on his headband and his eyes widened in realization.

"You see? You earned that headband from a field promotion, of all things, mastered an A-ranked ninjutsu that is dangerous even to jonin, passed Kakashi-sensei's difficult genin test with Sakura and Sasuke even though many teams failed it before... and you even managed to change Inari-kun's mind about fighting to defend one's dreams! Your ninja career has barely begun and you've already done so many impressive things! I'm sure that if you could do all of that, you can find a way to control a Bijuu's power, too."

Now it was Naruto's turn to blush. "Wow... w-well... when you put it like that, I suppose I _am_ really impressive, huh?"

He burst out laughing and Hinata was just about to join him... when a deafening roar rumbled through the woods, echoing dramatically as it announced to the world—

 _'Ugh. Not again...! Why now of all times?!'_

—that Hinata was hungry.

The girl cringed, face as red as a cherry, but the laughter she expected from Naruto never came.

"Shit!" he got up in a hurry and made a hand sign and created a trio of clones. "You guys, go on ahead!"

"Yes boss!" they chorused and took off.

When he turned to face Hinata, she was staring at him in bemusement. "I... kinda forgot to pack my stuff, hehehe," he scratched his head.

"And why didn't you go with them?"

Naruto grinned widely. "Well, what kind of friend I'd be if I just left you alone here like that?"

"...F-friend?" she gasped, rising immediately. "D-do you mean it?!"

"Of course! After all this talking, I'm pretty sure we _are_ friends already! Unless you—"

"N-NO!" Her blush returned at full strength. "I-I mean, no. I, uh, want to be your friend too!"

"Great! Then it's settled!" Naruto pumped his fists boisterously... and then his stomach growled as well.

Maybe it remembered Hinata's food and what their new bond might mean...?

Whatever the case, to Hinata's jealousy, Naruto shrugged the noise off as if it had never happened. "Well! I guess we should get back, huh? Before Zabuza gets mad and curse us or something," he smirked, making her laugh as well.

To the bluenette's relief, it barely took three seconds before Naruto kicked off a conversation, which they somehow maintained throughout their entire trip back to Tazuna's.

Both were smiling throughout the entire exchange, but that didn't exactly describe how they felt.

Naruto, the poor thing, was _still_ confused. Not like before—he understood Hinata much better now, which did solve many of the questions the girl had left him with. But despite that, he realized he still didn't know how to feel about her. Or rather, he didn't know how he felt about her feelings for him.

There were so many things that he couldn't even process it all.

Hinata's admiration had truly caught him off-guard, and it was something much stronger than what he had managed to earn from Konohamaru or Inari, and it felt much nicer, too. There wasn't a bad first impression he had needed to fight against to earn her respect. She had gone as far as calling him a _hero_! He became a source of courage and inspiration to someone, and it wasn't because he had been strong or used a fancy jutsu. He had just lost to those three bullies, badly. And that still caused Hinata to respect and admire him, somehow! It was actually a bit funny to him.

On the other hand, he was also honestly creeped out that she had been spying on him for so long (or whatever she thought she was doing), and... there was something "not nice" that he couldn't identify, there. But... she had wanted to be his friend all those years ago despite seeing how much of a screw-up he truly was, and even now, after knowing he had a freaking demon sealed on his belly and could suddenly go on a rampage at a moment's notice? She _still_ sought him out! It gave him hope that one day, perhaps, others would eventually accept him just like Hinata did, which is something that despite his bravado, deep down he had always doubted.

That the reveal about the Kyuubi made her _furious_ at the village as a whole instead of him... he'd rather not think about that, and desperately shoved that thought away.

What had been truly amazing for him, though... was that faith she had. The way she had spoken about him conquering that which had been too strong even for the Fourth Hokage... and even the way she had revealed, without noticing, that she _knew_ that he'd end up being the Hokage one day. The certainty behind her words was something Naruto couldn't even try to understand. Not when he, himself, wasn't as certain about it. As much as he never missed an opportunity to scream his dream to everyone who was close enough to hear, there was always that lingering doubt deep inside his mind.

Would he ever become more than just a loser? It surprised him that, to Hinata, he already _wasn't_. She saw all that he had accomplished, believed that he could do so much more than that and... just from the way she spoke, Naruto knew. She was rooting for him. She wanted him to succeed! To become something even greater than what he was! Even if he wasn't as great as she thought he was, but still,

All of those things... Naruto didn't know how he truly felt about that big package of discoveries. But that chaotic mess in his head and heart... it felt good.

He still thought she was weird, perhaps because he didn't understand everything she did. But now that they were officially friends, he knew he'd have the time to get rid of all this lingering confusion and doubt. He _wanted_ to understand her. And if there was one that he knew for sure, is that this newfound bond with Hinata was something he wanted to keep.

Hinata, meanwhile, was struggling to control herself. Unlike Naruto, she knew exactly what she was feeling, and that was pure happiness.

Naruto had always been... unreachable, like a sun that shone brightly over the sky, but was always too far away. She'd never wholly believed that she could get closer to that source of light that had guided her for so long, especially not after how far away he went after her first real attempt at reaching out to him. And now, all of a sudden, she was his friend!

But that to Hinata, honestly, was secondary. Because... she had finally _won._

She had finally conquered years of cowardice and self-doubt, and _that_ was what made Hinata so happy. She now could finally start making up to Naruto for all the moments she saw him suffering from loneliness and, sometimes even isolation, but was too scared and selfish to do what needed to be done.

Years of fighting and losing against her fears and anxiety culminating on that one moment of victory... Hinata didn't know how she even managed to hold up a reasonable conversation with Naruto afterwards. She quite honestly wanted to scream, even if she didn't know what.

Hinata was sure that those ghosts wouldn't go away. Maybe they wouldn't revolve around Naruto as much as they had until then, but she knew it was a war she'd be fighting throughout the rest of her life. And at the end of the day, she'd have to deal with another of those battles: facing her father and whatever judgment he passes on her.

But this time, it would be different. She wouldn't run away from him, no matter what he had to say.

Because if she could win once... what was stopping her from winning again?

* * *

A/N:

...

*sigh of relief*

So, this is the end of Teams 7 and 8's adventures in the Land of Waves (finally!). While there are some unanswered questions... these will be addressed in the next chapter, as they are more "character arc" issues than raw plot issues and this is already way too fucking big. They don't need to be resolved in the Land of Waves, necessarily.

One question I can answer here, though: the white chrysanthemum. In the japanese language of flowers (hanakotoba), it means "Truth", which I think is a very fitting theme for the discussions Naruto and Hinata had. I did find one source that mentioned "self-esteem" too, which amused me. This flower is also heavily favored in japanese burials. To them, strong colors and strong fragrances are a sign of disrespect, so a white flower with a very weak fragrance? It works out well. (except, y'know, someone just died.)

What can we look forward to? You might remember that a couple scenes from the original series didn't show up here... namely, Zabuza's final words, and when Naruto decides on his way of ninja. I suppose that having our favorite troublemaker chat with Haku and Hiruzen respectively might solve those issues. (there was also the scene where they leave Wave, but that is practically the same as canon and can be dealt via narration)

As for Hinata, she needs to have a long talk with her father... as well as introduce us to the other Hyuuga that are important to her life: Hanabi, Neji, and her retainer, Ko. And an outlook on the Hyuuga's council will be there, too. She'll have a bit of a talk with Sakura before all of that, however...

I really hope you guys enjoyed this arc, as looooooong and bumpy as it was! The bridge alone was big as the anime's, I think. I... am not particularly happy with some parts of these last updates, as I locked myself out of even coming close to the original's emotional impact because Haru's life didn't exclusively revolve around Zabuza like canon!Haku's and I never got the end of the bridge part to work... but I think Haku's scenes and the Team 8/Naruhina moments at the end made up for that!

Hopefully! I was really looking forward to writing out that last scene! Though there are a couple things I've purposefully left out for future interactions, it was way better than what I had crafted in my mind one year ago, when this arc began!

...But what I'm sure nobody enjoyed were the delays, particularly the big ones in May-June and these last ones. So, I came to a decision.

I've been wrestling with a schedule for the entirety of 2016, and it was barely manageable. As you guys might have read in my profile, college in this year will have higher stakes. I absolutely **cannot** afford to fail a subject from now on because that will force me to work through—and most importantly, _pay_ for—an extra semester. My family needs me to be graduating by December so that I can help money-wise when we go back to my hometown. And... that's assuming things at my dad's job won't go downhill, forcing us to move early to another state and messing everything up.

So this year, I cannot promise you guys any sort of schedule. Hopefully, in 2018 I'll have a stable job, no longer will have to deal with college, and can build a schedule again. But for this one, updates will go live when I'm able to find the time to work on them.

Honestly, it shouldn't be a significant difference in terms of update count from this past year (so about eight updates, maybe a lil' less), but I dunno if the word count total will go down or stay around the same. I cannot make any promises besides the fact that I _refuse_ to give up on this story.

...Well. With that said, four last things!

First: I want to thank everyone that read this far, especially early "adopters" who had to deal with waiting for updates longer! I practically have 500 followers, so that's a lot of people! Thank you all! I hope it was worth all the waits!

Second: Please leave a review if it's not too much! I'd like to hear your thoughts, especially if they are nice! Haha. Ideas for future plot points really can help, too. (I've been struggling for quite a while to think of a different first test for the chunin exams, for example... not too sure a copy paste from canon would be well recieved)

Third, SimplePotato says: "Sorry for the delay, dudes, I have been a bad potato, but I'll try to be better. Still, my job would be easier if flareblade knew how to write overwhelmed. Or at least chose one single way to write it wrong, for fuck's sake dude…"

As you can see, I overwhelmed him! XD

Last: Guest Review Answers!

DanceSnapple: Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad you liked the writing, descriptions and battles! As for your issues with canon, well. I plan to keep things close to canon, but I'll have to intervene from time to time.

I'll try my hardest to not do those things that would upset you, as they are pet peeves of mine too, but sometimes it ends up being needed. Or... sometimes what was done in canon was unnecessary—you will see a hint of this with a change during the chunin exams. Not in the sense of creating OCs, but in the sense of altering the base canon. This isn't set in stone, but the War arc in particular is a mess that, if I don't choose to embrace, will require some serious intervention to keep from happening.

And about Zabuza... I'm sorry for your loss. Your review broke my heart, and because I knew I'd break yours. Sorry! (You won't believe how much willpower it took to not make that arrow hit Zabuza's knee. Seriously! But he didn't deserve to be a meme.)

Mr. Guest: About your chapter 4 review... Kakashi actually openly criticized the entirety of Team 7 in their bell test.

My thought was that only truly major problems he didn't think would fix themselves with time are the ones he'd bother fixing himself, which is why he didn't try to stop the toxicity between Naruto and Sasuke from developing until it was a bit too late (or, rather, until Orochimaru and Itachi messed up with Sasuke and indirectly his dynamics with Naruto)

Note that he mostly focused on Hinata, but only because the issue he saw could easily get an entire squad killed by itself. Though for both Naruto, Sasuke and my fic's Kiba, the criticism doubled as taunts and subtle nudges about the bell test's true purpose, so there is that.

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.0.1

Added a missing Line break (probably the most critical of the entire chapter, ugh. I hate that FFdot net erases openoffice's line breaks!), fixed a couple typos, including a few pointed out by _gio08_ in a review! Thanks! Zabuza thanks you as well, given that "an arrow to his tight" makes you wonder if the arrow didn't hit his butt.


	18. Chapter 18 - Guiding Light (Sun)

Hey everyone!

Thank you all for the great feedback last chapter! It made me very happy, especially since I now have over 400 favorites and 550 followers. Again, thank you all!

So. If you take a glance below, you will notice this "arc" is labeled as "Intermission". It will be a micro arc with 2 chapters, bridging the Wave arc and the Chunin Exams.

And about that... I have slightly good and slightly bad news for you guys.

The slightly bad news is that, thanks to _Perentie Fan_ 's review—aim your pitchforks and torches at them—I got a couple new ideas for this chapter... which should be a good thing, but they were pretty difficult to work with and part of why I took so long to post this. (The other parts being college being the usual pain in the butt, and the fact that Zelda: Breath of the Wild is actually a flawed but _really_ good game. I had many, many doubts, but Nintendo shattered _most_ of them and completely robbed me of my free time during March).

The result is that progress was slow and the length of the final chapter would become a bit too big even for my tastes. Since the chapter had two distinct halves (Naruto/Hinata, as I explained in the last chapter's A/N), I decided to not leave you guys without an update till May/June and post the first half now. Unlike with the Shattered chapters, this one is a "full story" on its own, and there is no need to worry about a part 3 or anything of the like, or the kick between the legs called "cliffhanger". This might make this a chapter a bit too "wave-ish" for some, but there _are_ elements from future arcs too!

The good news is that my original plan for the intermission mini-arc was only two chapters long... and I'm keeping that plan. Though the intended first chapter became two, Chapter 20 will now kick-start and effectively be part of the Chunin Exams arc with its last scene (as well as overall being part of canon CE's content, due to introductions to the other teams and such). This adds a bit of length to the chapter, but I think this is all for the better, even if that extra part won't be that big or anything.

Just one last thing: this is me acknowledging my work's flaws (which doesn't excuse them), but... this chapter is very dialogue-heavy. It might not be a good idea to read it all in one sitting, but it's up to you.

Nonetheless, I hope you'll enjoy it!

* * *

 _Intermission_

Chapter 18: Guiding Light (Sun) [Current Version: 1.0.2]

* * *

For three long minutes, the sharp sound of pages turning were the only things that broke the silence in the Hokage's office as Hiruzen swiftly scanned the report he held. He was mostly flipping through the document, actually, but experience allowed him to quickly find key points in the report and have a comprehensive notion of the mission's relevant happenings with ease.

The report on the mission to the Land of Waves had some very interesting pieces of information, far more than he had ever expected, even. But most importantly...

"I must say," he raised his gaze, meeting the eyes of all genin assembled in the room, "you six have been very lucky. Missions that change parameters so drastically usually involve at least one casualty or career-ending wound, but here you are, alive and well. And from what I've read, all of you performed admirably during the entire mission, too."

"Yeah!" Naruto jumped suddenly, fist held high in the air. "We rocked, didn't we!?"

"Settle down," Kakashi calmly placed his one free hand on the boy's back, keeping him from bouncing around; the other hand, as always, was holding his favorite adult novel.

"Now, now, Kakashi. He has a right to be commemorating this success," Hiruzen chided, smiling. "They all have! This mission had everything to be a tragedy, but because all of you worked so well, this story didn't end that way. All nine of you should be proud of this!"

As if glad he was remembered, Akamaru barked in agreement from his cozy spot atop Kiba's head, and the little dog wasn't the only one that showed his happiness. From satisfied smirks to smiles of relief, from Naruto blowing a defiant raspberry to Kakashi only for the man to ruffle his blond mane in return, it brought forth a pleasant atmosphere to the room, and it was what finally lifted the weight from Hiruzen's shoulders.

He had made the right decision after all.

"Well," the Hokage began, clearing his throat, "the mission was a resounding success, but there are still some things we need to speak about. Firstly, where is the young man that came with you, as mentioned in the report? Haku, I believe?"

"Yes. He is in the waiting room, Hokage-sama," Kurenai answered.

"Hmm... I see." Without giving the topic another thought, Hiruzen placed his hand on the handle of one of his desk's drawers and pumped chakra into it. The drawer popped open, and he hunted for a bundle of thin envelopes bound by an elastic.

"Now, for what I'm sure you've been eagerly expecting: your payment."

Taking care not to accidentally knock on the various piles of paperwork that infested the sides of his desk, he quietly distributed the eight envelopes to his ninja. Almost all went from excited to disappointed very fast once they saw how much was inside.

"Hey, this is barely better than what we got from D-ranks!" Naruto exclaimed, angrily flipping the empty envelope upside down in hopes that maybe something was still there. Once he was sufficiently disappointed, he shoved the envelope inside his backpack like his peers and teachers had done.

"The C-rank's reward that Tazuna paid for was split between you eight, but these missions were meant to be paid only for four," Hiruzen explained, eliciting quite a few expressions of shock from the younger ninja.

"Wait! Hold on, you mean we went through all of that just for... _this_?" Sakura couldn't help but question, carefully controlling her expression and tone to keep her... explosive inner thoughts in check.

Hiruzen easily saw through her façade but didn't pay it any mind. "You see, Sakura, we work with tightly controlled budgets. Even though Kakashi had warned me that the mission changed rank via his dog summon, I couldn't set aside the rest of the reward money until I knew for sure what kind of mission I would need to pay for."

Sakura adopted a thoughtful pose in response. "Hmm... that makes sense," she conceded, though her voice betrayed hints of uncertainty still. Her mind briefly considered other factors Hiruzen didn't talk about, such as the possibility of failure or even deaths, but tried to forget about it all.

"This is normally not a very bureaucratic process, but even if its split in eight, an S-rank mission pays quite well. I believe that in three days I'll have all the money I owe each of you... which is exactly the amount of days off that I'll be giving you, by the way."

"Three days!?" Naruto, Sakura and Kiba all blurted out in unison. Their three quieter friends kept silent but were just as surprised by the news.

"Well, if it had been just a C-rank it would've been only one day, but the protocol for S-rank missions is very clear: three days," Hiruzen said, smirking at the genin's dumbstruck expressions.

Sharing an amused glance with Kakashi and Kurenai—who he imagined had purposefully withheld this information, knowing the kids wouldn't react well to their salary—the old man started to mess with his desk drawers again while the genin collectively cheered at the good news. He locked up the money drawer with a hand seal and opened the one right above it, which had no locking mechanism. From inside, he drew a black folder, with the letter S on the cover, and a plain white one.

"Moving on, Team 8. As clan heads, your parents hold considerable influence. I agreed to send them copies of every relevant report that involves you, which basically means everything but D-rank missions. The mission report will take a while to be ready since I need to examine it further, but there's a secondary report here about your training sessions that I can already send to them. All you need to do is hand this to my secretary in the waiting room and she will make the copies for you," Hiruzen said, all while splitting the report's pages between the two folders.

He then offered the white folder in the general direction of Kurenai's squad, and Shino boldly stepped out of the background to grab it, bowing afterwards.

The old Hokage nodded in return. "The mission report itself will be sent to them in the near future, of course." In the near future, meaning as soon as he had fully read the report and made an edited version with things he thought would be best kept under wraps omitted, such as the incident with Naruto's seal, or the true objective of the mission which was hidden from the genin but outlined in the report. "Lastly," he continued," I believe some of you need to visit the hospital to have your wounds healed, correct?"

"Yeah, me, Akamaru and Sasuke," Kiba confirmed, using his good arm to motion towards himself/Akamaru, and then Sasuke, who still was using crutches to move around.

Hiruzen shifted his gaze to Kakashi, who had his nose buried in a volume of Icha Icha Paradise, but was surely paying attention to everything around him. "Do you mind taking them to the hospital?"

"...Well, I suppose I don't have much of a choice," Kakashi replied in a bored tone, flipping a page of the book.

"Why, _yes._ You suppose correctly. And with that, I believe most of you are free to go. Enjoy your free time!"

Most of the ninja assembled bowed respectfully to their smiling Hokage and prepared to leave the room. Naruto, of course, didn't care for such trivialities, which allowed him to notice that Kurenai didn't bow either. It was easy to do the math—unlike Sasuke, she wasn't wounded in a way that would stop her from showing respect.

Guessing that Kurenai was the one Hiruzen meant to exclude from the dismissal, Naruto cheerfully waved to the Hokage as the others moved to leave.

"See ya, old man!"

He had only managed to take a couple steps Hiruzen called out to him.

"Now, now, Naruto. Don't you think we have something to discuss before you leave?"

The boy stopped. _'Oh, that's right!'_ he remembered. _'The fox!'_

That pause was just long enough that the other genin turned around too, while Kakashi kept walking. Sakura and Kiba looked at him with a simple mixture of curiosity and suspicion, and a single raised brow was the only thing that betrayed Shino's thoughts. But Sasuke... there was something burning behind that onyx-colored glare he was aiming Naruto, almost like an unspoken promise. Even though Sasuke never actually intimidated him before, this time Naruto almost found himself gulping under the weight of that disconcerting stare.

A small sigh—barely audible but blaringly loud in those two seconds of silence that followed Hiruzen's words—drew Naruto's attention away from Sasuke, and his eyes landed on Hinata, who was watching the others as well. The girl looked saddened by the distrust that polluted the doorway, but making eye contact with him was all she needed to soften her features. What once had been a frown became a small smile, and Naruto could feel her silent attempt to both comfort and encourage him.

It immediately made the words she had spoken on that hill, only a few hours before, echo in his mind.

 _"To me... you... you're a hero."_

No matter how nicely she had put it... Naruto knew it wasn't the truth. But in the face of someone who believed in him so earnestly, he felt compelled to live up to that noble image. A Hero—an example to be followed!

He could not falter. No... he _refused_ to, and faced the others with a wide grin.

"I'll catch up with you guys later, alright?"

Not giving them a chance to answer, he doubled back to Hiruzen, only barely hearing his fellow genin's footsteps as Kakashi called out to them from somewhere beyond the door.

However... Kurenai was still in the room. Naruto briefly wondered if she was related to what he had to discuss with the Hokage, but even Hiruzen seemed a bit confused by her presence.

"Kurenai, is something the matter?" the Professor asked patiently, noting with interest how she was subtly fidgeting. Naruto didn't, but it was hard not to notice her discomfort. Or was it something else?

"Actually... yes, there is. I need to... inform you of a certain incident, Hokage-sama,"

"Another?" The old man's eyes quickly darted between Kurenai and Naruto. "Is this related to...?"

Kurenai cut him off by shaking her head. "No, Hokage-sama."

"Hmm..." Hiruzen narrowed his eyes. Kurenai had left her request vague, implying a desire for privacy and leaving room for him to dismiss her if he deemed Naruto's issues a higher priority. Logically speaking, very few things could be as important as looking for a potential flaw in the seal that separated Konoha from its doom, but...

"Very well, then," he acquiesced, intrigued by her nervousness. "Naruto, do you mind sitting in the waiting room while we talk?"

"Oh... okay." Some people might call Naruto stupid, but he knew better than to think he had a choice in the matter. Shrugging, he once again turned and left the room, ignoring the two chunin that closed the door as he left.

* * *

Naruto only had to walk down the nearby corridor for a few seconds to arrive at the waiting room. Before even setting foot inside, he saw the first significant part of the room through the door: a long row of chairs hugging the wall, with a table nearby, full of magazines to distract people from the monotonous wait. But for the only person that was there, though, the magazines were clearly unnecessary.

Naruto didn't know what was so interesting about the old-looking book Haku was holding in his hands, but the Yuki looked completely lost in thought as he stared blankly at the cover.

Once he actually stepped into the room, he was able to see the only other relevant area within: the secretary's little office in the corner of the opposite wall, which was hidden from his sight until he entered.

The secretary was an elderly, white-haired woman who was completely nondescript save for her wide and absurdly thick glasses that covered her dark brown eyes: absolutely unremarkable. A massive shelf filled to the brim with dusty tomes and scrolls loomed over her and her workplace, which consisted of little more than a wooden desk and chair. The shelf aside, it was practically the same arrangement as the Hokage's office, only more compact.

In front of the desk were the members of Team 8, watching as the secretary was arranging two thin piles of documents over a scroll on the desk. It was a rather long scroll, and Naruto noticed the slightly unstable stack of paperwork by the floor that likely had to be moved from the desk because of it. While the Uzumaki couldn't see what was written on it, he did see the unknown characters glowing as the old woman held a hand sign.

The scroll flashed purple, reacting to her chakra, and the secretary immediately grabbed one of the small piles to put it into a brown folder, which she then handed to Hinata. "Here you go, sweetie," the old lady smiled warmly.

"Thank you!" Hinata replied, mirroring the secretary's expression as she grabbed the folder. It was only then that Naruto saw that Shino and Kiba held similar folders in their hands.

"Man, that's a nice sealing array you got there." Kiba whistled in awe, eyeing the scroll's seals. "Three copies in less than a minute? My mom would be jealous. The Copy Seals in her office are way slower."

"Well, as you can see, there are some perks to being the Hokage's secretary," the old woman laughed sweetly as she went about reorganizing her desk. It was incredibly disturbing for Naruto.

With the efficiency of an aged, experienced professional, it took her only a few seconds to place the second pile of documents in a familiar white folder, roll up the scroll and shove both items into her desk drawer while simultaneously continuing to make small talk with Kiba and Hinata. But as she was about to bend over to grab the stack by her desk's feet, her eyes met Naruto's and narrowed dangerously.

While the woman was rather unremarkable to the average person, to Naruto, she truly wasn't. Many people in Konoha disliked him to various degrees... but the Hokage's secretary was the rare kind of person where "dislike" was an understatement.

She almost never directed a word to him or even paid him much attention each time he got stuck in the waiting room—usually because of a prank. But when she did... oh, Naruto could still remember how badly she had scared him with nothing but her glares when he was much younger, a small boy that had just accepted Hiruzen's kind offer to teach him how to write and read.

She had been accusing him of something. _Blaming_ him for something.

That had been all his younger self had managed to decipher from her bone-chilling glares... glares that sometimes had even followed him to his sleep, haunting him in nightmares. It took him years to learn to ignore her and withstand her presence—he could always feel when he was in her sights, somehow—but the reason for such a clear display of hatred had always eluded him.

Until now. It had been her lunch break in the last time he came to the Hokage's office, for his registry photo...but as he once again felt that familiar sensation that made hanging out with Zabuza in his demon shroud look _appealing_ , Naruto thought that he finally understood her actions.

"Naruto? Back already? That was fast, dude."

Kiba's voice freed him from his thoughts. All of Kurenai's genin were staring at him in mild curiosity, thanks to the secretary giving his position away, and Naruto clung to this opportunity escape from her glare.

"Oh, er... Kurenai-sensei is talking with the old man right now, so they kicked me out for a bit," the blond shrugged, hoping it looked natural. "I didn't actually talk to him just yet."

Before any of Team 8's members could reply to that, though, the secretary spoke.

"Of course, as marvelous as sealing arrays can be, fuuinjutsu is not always such a good thing," she spat, coldly and bitterly, contrasting heavily with her earlier tone. "Quite the opposite."

Though the old lady spoke as if Naruto hadn't even been noticed, she still kept her eyes glued on him. He took a step back without even noticing it.

"Hmph." The secretary turned away to focus back on her job. "Now then," she smiled pleasantly, with a voice that lacked any of its previous edge, "is there something else I can... help with...?"

If Kiba and Shino were somewhat confused by the old lady's odd "acknowledgment" of Naruto, they were now completely lost as they saw their usually meek and sweet teammate was returning the favor with a cold glare of her own. It didn't even compare to the secretary's previous showing, but it was enough to force the woman to trail off.

Quite honestly, Naruto felt sorry for Hinata as he watched her. Her fists were balled up, quivering, and her open mouth obviously suggested she wanted to say _something._ But between her earlier admission that she struggled to talk to people and the Hokage's law forbidding her to speak up openly about what the secretary had just alluded to...

He saw the exact moment Hinata realized that the situation was simply beyond her, when her head lowered and a sigh seemed to escape her lips. Her expression was one of defeat and guilt, and when her head turned just enough for her lavender eyes to focus back on him, Naruto had the sensation she was trying to apologize for something.

She looked guilty, and Naruto was having none of it.

His reply was in the form of a small smile, just like the one she had given him before leaving with Kakashi and the others. He hoped she'd get his message, but the secretary found her voice before Hinata could react to it beyond widening her eyes.

"Is something the matter, dear?" the old woman asked, with genuine worry. "Do you need to go to the infirmary?"

Hinata turned to glare at the woman one last time before storming out of the room without honoring that with a response, or even saying goodbye to anyone.

Needless to say, such rudeness from the usually polite Hinata shocked all present, Naruto included.

"Hey! Hinata, where are you going!?" Kiba called out to her, to no avail. "Man... the hell was that?" he turned to Shino, whose raised eyebrows gave away his surprise. Even Akamaru had his little head tilted in confusion.

The Aburame kept silent, but he did shift his head a so that he could see Naruto again, and Kiba followed suit.

"Uh... don't ask me!" Naruto shrugged, hoping that his genuine surprise was enough to sell his own reaction as born out of ignorance. "Girls are weird."

Kiba seemed to accept that, but Naruto wasn't sure Shino bought it. The Aburame kept staring for a couple seconds longer before turning to Kiba.

"...Perhaps it would be best if we followed her." Both promptly said their farewells to Naruto and the old secretary—who still seemed confused—and left the room as well.

Naruto found it impossible to stop the dumb smile blossoming on his face as he watched them leave.

Given how strongly Hinata had reacted to what he'd told her just a few hours before, he supposed that maybe it was for the best that a scathing look was as far as she could go. In the end, Hinata failed to do anything in his defense... but to Naruto, it really was the thought that counted.

That she _wanted_ to defend him in the first place made him giddy on the inside. Neither the secretary's brief sidelong glare before she went back to her work nor his own lingering disbelief that someone was truly on his side could ruin that, or muddy the sensation, like what happened with Iruka due to the roller-coaster of emotions that had been his last day as an academy student.

It suddenly dawned on Naruto that he was standing around in the middle of the hallway, and he decided to sit down to wait for Hiruzen to summon him. However, his usual spot at the corner of the room—as far away from the secretary as possible—was already taken by Haku.

 _'Oh. I forgot about him.'_

It had been easy to overlook the Yuki's presence, given his silence. It would also be easy to just sit down elsewhere and maintain said silence, ignoring the mysterious glint in the boy's brown eyes when they made contact with his own blue orbs in the one moment Haku tore his eyes away from the book he held—which, Naruto curiously noted, was still completely closed.

But as he had once spoken to the Hiruzen's grandson, Konohamaru, there were no shortcuts to become Hokage. There was something he needed to do... something difficult, but he needed to do it.

Resolute, he approached Haku and sat down beside him.

"Hello, Naruto-san," the Yuki greeted him politely. Neutrally. There was a slight smile on his face, but Naruto could feel that it was a bit forced.

"Uh... hey," Naruto replied awkwardly. As much as he had something important to talk about, he decided to start with a little small talk. "So, what's up with this book?" he asked, keeping his voice low. Though she was far away and fully buried in paperwork, Naruto didn't want for the secretary to eavesdrop on them.

The question made Haku chuckle a bit, with no true humor to it. "I suppose it must look odd, doesn't it?"

The melancholy in Ice-user's voice made Naruto wary of prodding further, but his curiosity spoke louder. "Yeah... you've been staring at it, but you're not reading it."

"I can't." Haku's eyes fell to the book's simple, title-less cover. "This is my sister's diary, you see."

"Oh."

What Naruto could see, was his idea of small talk being mercilessly tossed out of the window, never to be found again.

"We were always on the run because of missions or hunter-nins, so there wasn't much time or space for anything but essentials like clothes and weapons. This is basically the only thing of any value she had, so I've kept it," he explained. "But even though she... isn't here anymore, I won't read this. I already made that mistake once."

The comment drove Naruto into silence, understandably.

"My apologies. I shouldn't be talking about... something as heavy as this," Haku shook his head. He had spent an entire week alone with his thoughts, grieving and wondering about his own future. He yearned for something to distract him from that, but there hadn't been much time for idle conversation after he arrived at Tazuna's house, between lunch and the final preparations for their trip back to Konoha. As such, Haku was now in a village that he knew next to nothing about, and decided that this was the chance to correct that.

"Maybe we should talk about something else, Naruto-san? How about—"

"No."

The question died on Haku's mouth.

"Look, I know... I know you don't want to talk about any of this," Naruto started, head hung too low for his face to be seen. "I know that this really doesn't matter in the end, but still... I... I need to say something."

When a reply didn't come, Naruto raised his head and saw Haku's gazing intently at him. He didn't know what to make of the silence at first, but just as he was about to take it as a sign to continue...

"...You feel responsible for her death."

"What?"

"It's written all over your face," Haku said, making Naruto sigh.

"I... guess I can't hide it, huh?"

"You can't hide it, nor should you feel that way," Haku shook his head, forlornly. "What happened on the bridge that day... none of it was your fault, Naruto-san."

"She... she only tried to go help Zabuza like that because she thought you were dead." Naruto muttered, not understanding why Haku's semblance was one of sympathy and sorrow rather than anger and hatred.

 _'So I was right.'_ Haku closed his eyes to steady himself. _'You were trying to kill yourself, weren't you, sister...?'_

"And that _was_ my fault!" Naruto continued, struggling to keep his voice low. "Just... how can you even say it wasn't?"

"Because _I_ made you use that power in the first place." Haku's eyes reopened and he turned to Naruto. "I don't understand your ability, but I have a suspicion that it was connected to your emotional state. Am I right?"

"I... honestly, I don't understand it very well," the Uzumaki confessed, looking a bit lost. "I can't use it whenever I want, so... I guess?"

"Hmm..." Haku briefly reconsidered his hypothesis, but he saw nothing else that could justify how their fight had gone. "If I'm right... it means that you only made use of your power because of how I fought you."

Naruto began to scratch his head, internally cursing himself for not remembering those events very well.

"You see," Haku continued, "I don't like to fight. If I'm able to, I'd rather allow or force my enemies to flee, and if that doesn't work, knock them out rather than kill them. But in a way, that means I didn't take our fight seriously enough until it was too late."

If there was one thing Naruto did remember clearly, was how disrespected he felt throughout their fight. At the time, he had thought his masked opponent was just toying with him and Sasuke, but even though he now understood that wasn't right, the underlying point was still the same: Haku could've ended the fight without much difficulty before the Sharingan and the Kyuubi's chakra even became factors.

"Hmm... I think I see what you're trying to say," Naruto said, after a moment of silence.

"Furthermore," Haku's gaze once again fell to his sister's diary, "It was my fault she was even there in the first place."

To Naruto, that statement came across as Haku feeling guilty about letting Haru enter their fight. He wasn't wrong—it was certainly part of the package—but what Haku truly blamed himself for was allowing his sister to participate in missions.

The diary was a painful reminder of his failure. The one entry he had read should've made him realize how bad of an idea it would be to let her join him and Zabuza during missions, but he had thought about it wrongly. He had encouraged her at first because he believed she should be able to defend herself just in case... and later, because he thought it would bring Haru some peace of mind if she was with him and Zabuza, despite how dangerous it was. It worried him, but he also trusted Zabuza's judgment.

He should've opposed it. He should've protected her! But instead...

"Umm..."

Naruto's little noise of uncertainty drew Haku's attention to him, and at that moment, Haku noticed his vision was blurred so much that he couldn't even spot Naruto's whisker marks.

Quickly, he wiped his eyes. "I'm sorry you had to see that."

Naruto didn't answer at first, giving Haku time to recover and giving himself time to gather his own thoughts. But as soon as he saw Haku had recomposed himself, he proceeded. "You know... you're wrong too. Maybe you had some fault, yeah... but in the end, it was still my fault."

The Ice-user, now scowling, was just about to snap at Naruto... but the younger boy didn't give him room to interrupt.

"I could've stopped her. I know I could've!"

The boy's distress made Haku stop himself. "...From what?" he prodded.

"From going after Zabuza. I... I had a chance to stop her."

His guilt was so strong, that Naruto couldn't even remember what he had been about to do before Haru fled. All that his mind could focus on was that the girl had run towards her death and he failed to do anything about it.

As for Haku... these words brought about a realization. It didn't soothe his heart any, but perhaps for Naruto, it might. His voice came out almost as a whisper.

"I think... my sister would still end up doing it, no matter which one of us tried to stop her, or how. Zabuza was simply that precious for her." Haku knew that he, despite having all the signs and clues, wouldn't have figured out Haru would be willing to throw her life away for Zabuza until it was too late... and he wasn't sure him being alive or dead would've influenced her.

Naruto's only answer was to frown as he tried and failed to understand that logic. Not Haku's, but Haru's.

No, perhaps logic wasn't quite what he wanted to understand.

"Was Zabuza truly that important for you guys? I mean... he didn't even seem to care!" the genin blurted out, indignant. Zabuza's reaction to Haru's sacrificial stunt was still clear in his mind, and he simply couldn't fathom how a person as cold as Zabuza would be able to evoke such devotion from another person.

"To her... he was a hero," Haku began. Naruto almost choked when he heard those words, but Haku didn't notice it. "Our father had abandoned us, and we had to live on the streets. Eventually Haru became extremely ill... and it was Zabuza who saved us. But he had said that there would be a price," he spat. He remembered very well how cocky Zabuza had been, knowing Haku effectively didn't have a choice. "I had thought Zabuza didn't care, too. But my sister always insisted otherwise, and... I guess she saw something in him that I never saw."

"Huh? You mean that... he actually cared?"

Naruto could remember some signs. Despite Zabuza's callous words, he had been completely furious when Gatou killed Haru. But... if that was the case...

"It's hard to believe, isn't it?" Haku smiled bittersweetly at Naruto's disbelieving expression. "It has been a week already, and I don't think it has sunk in for me just yet."

While not being his last words, what Zabuza had said back in the bridge was something Haku couldn't get out of his mind.

 _"Haku... Please, forgive me, for... never treating you and your sister like you deserved. I didn't want to accept it... to embrace those emotions... but to me... you two were more than just tools."_

It was painful to share those words with Naruto. Zabuza's ideology that emotions were a weakness had always bothered Haku, but now that he could see just how much they all lost because of it... it was torturing.

"Zabuza said that, huh...?" Naruto spoke in a low growl. "That bastard used your sister as a _human shield_ when she tried to protect him, and he still had the nerve to say something like that!?"

"Oh... he did that, didn't he?"

"I _saw_ it happening!" the blond boy almost screamed, getting up. Something about Haku's neutral tone was maddening enough that Naruto didn't know how he even managed to keep his voice down. The motion did earn him a glance and a raised eyebrow from the secretary, though, but the woman went back to her paperwork before Naruto spotted it.

He also never caught the traces of the fury he thought Haku's features should've been rightfully displaying. There was only something akin to understanding, there, and Naruto didn't reflect that expression in the slightest.

"Your sensei reacted similarly to you, on the bridge" the Yuki mentioned. Kakashi's cold, harsh accusation that Zabuza had only been trying to alleviate his own guilt for his part in Haru's death had stung. Haku had always known they were disposable but... to throw her at Kakashi's attack like that?

 _"I had expected... worse from you, Kakashi. That you'd go through her anyways or... use her as... hostage. If you did that... I... wouldn't be able to fight you. You'd kill me... and then do who know what to her. I just couldn't... let that happen."_

Those words instantly made Naruto remember Haru's reason for declining his offer to go to Konoha with him: the fear of what might have happened to her in a foreign village because of her rare bloodline. Had that been Zabuza's worry? Naruto had no doubts self-preservation was part of it, but considering what Hinata implied back on the bridge, had he been trying to spare Haru from such a fate, in a twisted way?

...It did make him wonder why Haku didn't exhibit a similar fear now, though, and how he could've believed Zabuza so easily.

When Naruto posed that question to the Haku, the first part of the Ice-user's answer was but a small laugh. "A person might hide their emotions from you using words, actions, and even carefully masking their expression, Naruto-san. But their eyes will always show you the truth... it's just a matter of whether or not you are willing to look for it."

Under the weight of Haku's words, Naruto lowered his gaze to the ground. _'...The eyes, huh?'_

He could remember trying at many points to understand other people's emotions, but he had always failed again and again, until it was all but spelled out for him. From why the villagers treated him with so much disdain, years ago... to more recent events, like his struggles to understand Hinata and even Sasuke.

Thinking back, it was no wonder Mizuki had fooled him so easily.

Perhaps there was some wisdom in what Haku was saying, but Naruto quickly realized he couldn't make use of it just yet.

"Zabuza always treated me and Haru as if we were tools... and he always made it clear to us that our relationship wasn't anything more than that," Haku continued, sighing. "Perhaps if I had noticed all of this earlier..."

While the Yuki lost himself in a sea of what ifs, wondering if perhaps he could've helped Zabuza to open up if he had recognized the signals... Naruto clung to the unknown logic behind the swordsman's behavior.

"Do you know why he did that?" he looked up to Haku again, who was fiddling with the sleeves of his blue yukata. "I mean... I don't see the point of pushing you guys away, if he truly cared."

"He always told me that emotions are a weakness that the enemy can exploit. That's why he was so guarded," Haku answered, stiffly, remembering how Zabuza had always criticized his gentle nature. It took years for the swordsman to accept he wouldn't be able to turn Haku into a cold killing machine. "I personally don't agree with that but..."

"But?"

Haku's features contorted in disgust. "As ninja, we are always under someone's command. Be it a jonin-sensei, a squad leader, a jonin commander, a kage, or even a daimyo. We are paid to _do_ , not to think or feel. As much as I'm against that kind of thinking... it is the rule of our world. And going against those rules... well," he scoffed, "there is a reason Zabuza became a missing-nin."

"Nnngh..." Naruto's fingers curled up in a ball.

If there was a nearby desk had been a couple feet closer, he'd have slammed his fists into it. Naruto had to make do with his knees, which hurt a bit, but he didn't care about that or about being overheard.

"That's so much _bullshit!_ "

"N-Naruto-san...?

"That's _not_ what we're supposed to be! Not at all!" he got up, baring his teeth. "We're supposed to help people! To help make a better world, not just do anything for money! What you're saying is all wrong!"

On the back of his mind, Naruto realized that for Haku, there hadn't been much of a choice. They, as missing-nin, had to take whatever jobs they could or go hungry... if not turn to banditry. But his outburst went beyond Haku's situation.

His head and tone lowered a bit when he next spoke. "I get what Zabuza was thinking. And in some ways I guess he was right, about emotions. But if we don't feel, we can't do the right thing! We can't make our own choices!"

"... And what about your village, Naruto-san?" Haku, somehow, found it in himself to play devil's advocate. Or perhaps... demon's advocate. "If you receive a mission such as ours... to kill a good man for the wrong reason, but you only find out when you actually get there? Would you abandon the mission, knowing how much that would hurt your reputation and your village's?"

Hake had expected that the question would give Naruto some pause. That the blond would see that nothing is as black-and-white as his naive, idealistic views made it sound.

But while Naruto had always known there was a dark side to being a shinobi, his answer came without a shred of doubt in it, almost cutting off Haku as he posed the question.

"That's not the reputation I'd want to have! And not what I'd want for the Leaf either!" Naruto's teeth were still in full display, but where before they showed anger, now they just completed his self-assured grin. "And if they have a problem with me, then I'd just have to become Hokage even faster! I'd never allow my own village to become like that! Believe it!"

Haku, rendered speechless by Naruto's resolution, could only stare in awe at the boy. There was... some sort of aura that surrounded Naruto as he spoke.

Even knowing how naive Naruto was being, Haku found himself led by the pull of his words... but the spell was broken when both heard a scoff from the other side of the room. Neither had the chance to address it, however, as another person chose that moment to join them, drawing Haku's attention.

"Kurenai-san?"

"Just what is happening here?"

Naruto turned around to see Kurenai by the hallway leading to the Hokage's office, looking at him skeptically.

"Oh... h-hey, Kurenai-sensei!" he smiled broadly at Kurenai, but she didn't buy his fake casualness and only narrowed her eyes at him. Kiba liked to use that tactic too, and it was just as easy to see through.

"Naruto, there are people working here," she scolded, pointing at the secretary. "I could hear you from the office."

"Hehehe... sorry for bothering you and the old man. I guess I got a little carried away." Naruto, of course, was purposefully apologizing only to Kurenai. He felt a chill going down his spine, telling him this wasn't lost on that certain someone.

"Well... Hokage-sama wants to see you now. Be on your best behavior, okay?" she added, softening her tone.

"I'll try, I promise," Naruto smiled, prompting Kurenai to do the same. The woman excused herself and left the room with a small but very noticeable smile.

Naruto watched her go curiously, and then turned to Haku. "I guess I'll... uh."

Once again, the Ice-user was gazing down at Haru's diary, deeply lost in his own thoughts. There was something different about the way Haku was looking at it now, though, and with the older boy's previous words in mind, Naruto couldn't help the frustration that came when he didn't know what he could see reflected in those brown eyes.

"I guess I'll be going," he muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Once he was gone, though...

"Excuse me, miss?" Haku tentatively looked up to the secretary. Unlike the glacial glares he caught her shooting at Naruto earlier, she regarded him rather neutrally.

"What is it?"

"I... I think I need some fresh air, is there somewhere else I can go to wait?"

The old woman pointed to a hallway on the other side of the room. "Second on the left takes you to the roof, dear. If you feel unwell, the infirmary is on the floor below, third to the right. You can leave your bags in the chair, though. I'll watch them for you!"

He reflected her smile, though his was forced. "Thank you."

Rising, Haku left the room.

 _'Naruto Uzumaki... what an interesting boy.'_

* * *

Finding the door to the Hokage's office wide open and its owner busy signing some papers, Naruto wasted no time in entering.

His footsteps were loud enough to alert Hiruzen to his entrance. "Ah, Naruto," he looked up from his work. "I hope I didn't make you wait for too long? I do know you detest waiting," he chuckled.

"Nah, it was okay," the blond replied as he closed the door. "I was talking with Haku, so it was no big deal."

Hiruzen raised an eyebrow at that. Considering the history between the two—which the report had outlined—it made him become curious... but they had more pressing matters to discuss, and it made him motion for Naruto to halt when the boy went to sit on the nearby chair.

"I believe it would be better if you were standing up for this next part," Hiruzen clarified, rising from his own chair—under protests from his back—to make his way around the desk. "This might seem a little weird, but would you please lift up your shirt for me? I need to inspect the seal on your stomach."

"Uh... okay?" Somewhat unsure, Naruto had just finished unzipping his jacket when it struck him. "Wait, my seal is on my belly!? How come I never saw it?" he asked, inspecting himself and finding nothing unusual underneath his shirt.

"If you use your chakra, the seal should react to keep the Kyuubi's from mixing with your own. But, alternatively," Hiruzen made a trio of hand signs and lightly pressed a glowing finger to Naruto in the gut. "I made a little jutsu that can also reveal sealing formulas," he explained with a small laugh.

Naruto watched with mild wonder as black markings spread from where Hiruzen touched. "Wow... and I thought explosive tags looked complex." Sure, the spiral in the center looked simple enough. But the intricate writing that surrounded said spiral and expanded outwards at eight different points? It was completely alien to Naruto.

"It uses the Eight Trigrams Sealing Technique, which is indeed very complex. Few fuuinjutsu techniques are strong enough to keep a bijuu's chakra at bay," Hiruzen said, lowering himself to get a better look. His eyes darted over the seal on Naruto's stomach multiple times, occasionally even brushing his finger over the sealing formula, examining it as best as he could.

After an agonizing couple minutes where Naruto fought valiantly to not burst out laughing from Hiruzen's accidental tickling, the old Kage rose and silently returned to his chair. Naruto took it as a cue to do the same.

"Uh, so?" he prompted.

"From what I can see, your seal is fine, Naruto. But I'm not an expert in the subject," Hiruzen sighed. "It will take about months for him to arrive, but I'll contact someone more knowledgeable about seals to give it a look."

"Well, okay," Naruto shrugged. "But say, if this thing is working... I don't get how the fox could've used its chakra on me back in the bridge."

Hiruzen grabbed and lighted his pipe. "Under normal circumstances, the fox can't aid you. But you can take from its chakra, to a degree, as long as you know how."

"What!?" Naruto squawked. "W-wait, isn't that dangerous?"

"Very. Your seal is strong, but the fox can influence you as long as you make the decision to call upon it, just as it can choose to deny you. But if you didn't know about it... hmm." Hiruzen took a drag on his pipe. "Would you mind telling me what happened on the bridge? I read about it in the report, but perhaps hearing from you might give me more to work with."

"...Okay" he mumbled, fidgeting a little. "I... I think I can try."

As much as Naruto disliked remembering those events, he told Hiruzen about everything he did while on the bridge until the fox's power receded for the second time. He had already given a brief version of the story to Kakashi and Kurenai, but this time he didn't hold anything back and retold the story to the best of his abilities, including what he could remember feeling at the time.

Hiruzen listened to the entire tale in silence.

"So... that's about it. After Hinata showed up I didn't get to use that power again," Naruto concluded. "Haku saw a lot that I don't remember, though... maybe he could help."

"I see. I will try to get his version as well, but believe I already understand what happened." Hiruzen put the pipe down and focused on Naruto, who was staring at him with clear unease in his eyes. "The moments the fox's power spiked correspond to when you saw or heard about one of your friends dying, doesn't it?"

"I guess," Naruto quietly nodded, and despite the tense atmosphere, Hiruzen held back a smile for the briefest of moments.

"And I suppose you don't remember anything about the bijuu that, surely, was covered in the academy, correct?"

Naruto just laughed nervously. Hiruzen had, more than once, remarked that he would regret not paying attention to classes or skipping them altogether...

"The bijuu are creatures of raw chakra, of which half is spiritual energy, connected to emotions. My theory is that the fox's chakra reacted to the intense emotions you felt during those moments. The seal managed to hold it back for the most part, but your distress was enough to make some of the chakra go through."

The boy practically wilted.

"Strong emotions, huh..."

In retrospect, Hiruzen's words held a ring of truth. He had never felt so overwhelmed by his own emotions than that one moment when he believed Sasuke had died in his arms, and hearing Haru talking about how she had killed Kiba and Hinata only minutes afterwards... his memory was compromised, yes. But Naruto would never forget how badly he had wanted to kill. Every fiber of his being had been screaming for blood... it was horrible enough to make him shudder just from remembering.

Hiruzen's hawk-like eyes didn't miss it. "Do you wish to talk about it, Naruto?" he offered gently, softening his features.

"...Not really."

"I see... but please," the old man smiled, "remember that I can always make some time for you if you need me."

Of course, Hiruzen was an extremely busy man. He even consistently failed to make some time to spend with his family, but Naruto... he had to think as a Hokage. From that perspective, Naruto was a priceless resource, and Hiruzen knew that the boy would probably never accept to undergo therapy. His childhood experiences wouldn't allow it, and Hiruzen knew that it was his blame and his responsibility to assist Naruto if he so needed. Or, at the very least, send Iruka to help him.

"Nah... I'm cool. All this means is that I'll have to train even harder to keep this from happening again!" he tried to assure the old Kage. Though his smile didn't quite reach his eyes, the intention behind those words was genuine—Naruto knew he never wanted to feel that way again.

"...That's a good way of looking at it," Hiruzen relented, wisely accepting that pushing wouldn't work. "Perhaps working on new jutsu would be a good start for now. I've read that you already discovered your affinity, yes?"

"Yeah!" Naruto almost jumped in his chair, and the sparkle Hiruzen was fond of seeing in his eyes returned. "Kakashi-sensei had me and Kiba use chakra on a weird paper thingy, and mine split in half!"

"Wind," Hiruzen nodded to himself. "It's a powerful element, and quite rare."

"Well, yeah..." Naruto's excitement wavered. "Kakashi-sensei said he doesn't know a whole lot about working with Wind. He can use it, but he didn't train with it. I'm kinda worried he doesn't know how to teach me about it, cuz he said it would've been better to keep improving my chakra control and had me climbing trees. _Again_ ," he huffed, arms crossed.

"Hmm..." Hiruzen scratched his chin. "You always did have problems with chakra control, but I wouldn't worry too much. My son, Asuma, is one of the sensei that will be working with you as part of my project. His affinity is Wind as well, and I'm sure he will be willing to help you if you hit any roadblocks."

"I hope so! I can't wait to start shooting a tornado or something cool like that!"

Hiruzen couldn't help but smile with the boy, but for a different reason. Naruto's words were the same boisterous ones as always, but he could see in the boy's eyes that he had a deeper purpose for seeking out power. A new fire, that went beyond the wish for personal glory and fancy magic tricks.

 _'His parents would be proud.'_ Hiruzen knew.

But such flames required a fuel to remain lit. He had seen a glimpse of what was to come the day before the two genin squads left, but he needed to confirm it himself... especially given a little, seemingly unimportant detail he had found in the report.

He cleared his throat. "Now then... while this incident with the Kyuubi greatly worries me, I must confess that I'm relieved that it did happen."

Naruto's eyebrows shot up. "...What are you talking about, old man?"

"If our theory is correct... then this only happened because your bond with your teammates and even Team 8 became much stronger during this mission. Am I right?"

Hiruzen had expected that Naruto would react bashfully to his words. As he got older, Naruto had become disillusioned with the idea of making friends, and when Hiruzen started bothering him about it, his only answer always had been that "the guys are really annoying and the girls only want to know about their _Sasuke-kun_ ", dismissing the idea entirely.

But to his pleasant surprise, Naruto's blue eyes began to sparkle as he graced Hiruzen with one of his brightest smiles.

"Yeah! A lot of stuff happened, you know?" And without even being asked to, Naruto rapidly began to talk about his friends and the changes that they—and himself—had gone through in these past two weeks.

He shared with Hiruzen that both of his teammates were becoming a lot nicer to him and even were willing to help him out where he struggled. It was one of the reasons Hiruzen had built this squad, and the old man couldn't help but be happy that things were going according to plan... even if it took drastic measures from Kurenai's part to bring those changes in them, including Naruto himself.

He spoke about how Kiba became a lot less aggressive once he got defeated in combat—Hiruzen couldn't stop himself from laughing at how happened, with a fart of all things—and especially once they worked together in a few spars. The camaraderie born from fighting with and against other people was something Hiruzen had always appreciated seeing in his subordinates.

The Uzumaki even spoke about Inari, and how the little boy matured during their mission, inspired by Naruto's own ideals. It was because of that story that Hiruzen saw for the first time that Naruto had, indeed, the potential to one day be a leader worthy of the hat he currently wore.

Somewhat to his expectations, Naruto confided that he still didn't understand Shino very well, but also said that the Aburame was "kinda cool, in his own weird way." It did amuse Hiruzen very much to hear that, and he was glad that Naruto was open to the idea of bonding with someone so radically different from himself.

But towards the end, Naruto's brimming confidence vanished, replaced by the insecurity and fear that Hiruzen remembered seeing in him only when Naruto had been much younger... when he didn't know how to hide it.

When the boy's gaze fell to the floor and there remained, Hiruzen started to become worried.

"What's wrong, Naruto?"

The reply didn't come right away.

"...Sakura-chan, Kiba and Shino felt it," he began, in a voice off-puttingly quiet. "They don't know what went wrong in the bridge, but they know something happened and I know they think it's me. And Sasuke... we fought together. He _knows_ there was no way I could've beaten Haku by myself."

Hiruzen leaned forward, hands clasped in front of his face and elbows planted on the desk. He didn't need to ask anything.

"I'm afraid that this is a choice you will have to make on your own, Naruto. Telling them the truth comes with a risk, I know, but leaving them suspicious about yourself and what you are capable off can harm your relationship with them just as much, especially with your actual teammates... which can have its consequences during missions. They won't be as trusting as before. If this problem explodes at the wrong time, it might end up with all three of you dead."

Naruto gulped, visibly stricken.

"But while I can't help you... I can tell you what I'd do in your place. I'd strengthen my bonds with them as best as I could, and I'd definitely tell them the truth sooner rather than later, lest the events of the bridge repeat themselves. As long as they truly are your friends, they won't abandon you because of your burden."

"Hmm..." Naruto began to mull over those words of wisdom, trying to come to a decision. Before he could, however, Hiruzen had an epiphany.

"Actually, I may be able to do a little thing for you..."

He shared his idea with Naruto and, with a mix of relief and disgust, watched as the boy's mood brightened once again. It wouldn't do that much to help his situation, but...

"Ha!" Naruto puffed his chest, smug and prideful. "I told Iruka-sensei that it wasn't stupid!"

Hiruzen just sighed wearily. "Just remember that you, supposedly, have no recollection of it."

"Will do!" he nodded readily. His joy wavered a bit when Hiruzen grew serious and kept staring at him. "Uh... did I do something?"

"No. And that's the problem." Naruto blinked, puzzled. "When we began to talk about your friends, don't you think you forgot someone?"

Albeit far from a harsh one, it was more an accusation than a question, Naruto realized.

"Well... Hinata, huh?" Naruto smiled guiltily, scratching his head. "Sorry, old man... I didn't know if you'd be mad with me or not, you know?"

"Mad at you?" Hiruzen echoed, and his features softened as he shook his head. "Naruto, I read the report. It's not your fault that the fox's chakra overwhelmed you in that moment, nor it was your fault that someone happened to see you."

"Huh? No! I wasn't talking about that," Naruto replied in confusion. "It's just that... well, I told her the truth. About the Kyuubi and everything."

If Hiruzen had been taking a drag that moment, the pipe surely would've fallen to the floor.

It took him some moments to recover from how casually Naruto dropped that bomb. "That was... risky," he eventually managed.

"I thought so too. But then I remembered about that law," Naruto shrugged. Despite treating it as if it was nothing, recalling how that conversation began still sent his heart racing.

"Heh... is that so?" Hiruzen couldn't deny that, despite this particular law being a sore spot for him, the idea of Naruto of all people purposefully using a law like that was very amusing. But more than amused, Hiruzen was _relieved_. He had seen what went on between Naruto and the other genin after he stopped Naruto from leaving.

"Yeah... like I said, I thought you'd be angry since it's supposed to be a secret, so that's why I didn't say anything, but you just told me to tell the others one day so... but that's just part of it. I kinda still don't know what to even think about all that happened earlier today," the boy admitted, sighing, making Hiruzen realize why this incident wasn't mentioned in the reports.

"It's all so confusing and weird!" Naruto continued, almost pouting. "Just when I start to think I'm getting it, she goes and makes everything messy again."

Hiruzen was laughing before he even realized it, which Naruto obviously didn't take too well.

"This isn't funny, you know!"

"Well, well... why don't you tell me about what happened?" Hiruzen offered, ignoring the boy's glare. "Perhaps I can help you make some sense out of it all."

"Hmm..." Naruto crossed his arms and considered it. "Okay, we can try it."

If Hiruzen had to choose the best verb to define how Naruto explained things to him, "to blab" was by far the most appropriate. A ramble where finding the actual beginning, middle and end was all but impossible, especially when the boy sprinkled bits of other conversations or interactions with Hinata that Hiruzen lacked the context to decipher.

But he had heard enough to understand the heart of the matter. When Naruto stopped talking and just looked at him expectantly, Hiruzen began to talk.

"When you don't understand something, charging headfirst into it is usually the worst thing you can do. This goes for people as well... especially for those that are quiet and introverted, like young Hinata," he advised. "Despite it all, you still chose to be her friend, no?"

"Well, yeah." Naruto wasn't crazy enough to miss such an opportunity. Who knew if he'd ever find another person willing to be his friend after finding out about the Kyuubi? While he didn't know exactly what he was getting into—she had admitted to practically _stalking_ him at some point after all—this was a chance he couldn't afford to miss.

But still...

"Then just take your time, and be patient." Hiruzen paused, both to let the words sink in and to take a drag from his pipe. While the boy digested his words, the Hokage watched him carefully.

"Hmm," he eventually put his pipe down again. "I suppose you've already come to this conclusion on your own."

With his mouth and eyes wide open in an almost comical fashion, Naruto _almost_ asked Hiruzen how he knew, but his mind went back to the little chat he had with Haku. _'Man... am I really that obvious?'_

"And it looks like something still bothers you."

 _'Well. Guess that is a yes...'_

As if to prove Naruto's point further, Hiruzen smiled knowingly. "Heh... I think I know what it is."

 _'Definitely a yes,'_ Naruto pouted. He, somehow, felt mocked. "Well, yeah. There's something," he admitted, "but... _I_ don't know what it is."

Naruto only knew that what he was feeling was weird—much like the person that brought about the sensation now that he had the time to stop and reflect upon that conversation, without Haku's presence to remind him of something else, that is.

"Understandable," Hiruzen began. "I suppose you never met anyone that holds you in high regard without you going out of your way to earn it. A bad impression to overcome is usually easier to deal with than high expectations you must meet. After all, if someone doesn't expect anything from you..."

Naruto's eyes brightened with understanding. "That sounds about right!"

It was obvious to him, now.

Naruto knew the truth—he was a loser. But apparently, Hinata didn't. While he considered that he might be selling himself short—she did point out he did a lot of awesome things already—her words still didn't match up with the reality that he lived in... and what would happen if she suddenly saw him for who he was?

The Professor sighed. "This might sound like a whole new problem for you, I'm sure. But Naruto... it's basically the same as the issue you have with your other friends."

"Uhhh..." the blond thought about it for a moment. "It is?"

"Trust this old fool for a moment and just be yourself, Naruto. You'll be fine, I promise." Seeing as Naruto was still fidgeting a little, he decided to go for a dirty trick as a taunting smirk spread across his wrinkled face. "Perhaps you forgot your confidence when packing your things before lunch today?"

"Well, I gu—hey, how do you know that!?"

"Hahaha! I've known you since you were half your size, boy! You always leave these things for the last minute," Hiruzen replied between laughs.

Naruto tried to look angry—to Hiruzen's further amusement—but eventually cracked a smile as well. "Heh... thanks, old man."

"Well then," Hiruzen coughed. "I suppose that's all we had to talk about for now."

"Actually," Naruto interrupted before he could be dismissed. "Can I talk you about something else?"

Hiruzen raised an eyebrow. Naruto no longer displayed fear, insecurity or anything special in his body language and expression. "...Very well. Go on."

"So, you see..."

It took the Uzumaki a couple minutes, but he eventually managed to tell Hiruzen all about the interactions he had with Zabuza and the Yuki siblings, as well as what he had gleaned from the bridge battle.

The old Hokage's first instinct was to scold Naruto for letting his guard down around a stranger—one that turned out to be an enemy, no less—but he stopped himself. Leaning forward a bit, he spoke up once Naruto stopped talking.

"I'm afraid I don't quite see where you are going with this."

Naruto shifted around in his seat. "I guess what I'm trying to ask is... if we ninja really are tools, like Zabuza kept saying. Are we really just... things to be used?"

Despite his vehemence when talking to Haku only minutes before, he couldn't help but doubt it all. He was young, but he was well aware life not always was that simple.

Hiruzen let out a long, weary sigh while he considered his answer for a moment. Eventually, he rose from his chair and motioned for Naruto to get closer. "Come with me for a second."

A little confused, the boy did as he was told to, and Hiruzen led him towards one of the windows on the back of the room.

"Wow... you've got a pretty good view of the village from here." Naruto commented idly, to which Hiruzen merely hummed in agreement. The old man's eyes darted around slowly, taking in the sight of the village he swore to protect with his very life.

"Your question is rather broad," Hiruzen began. "Let's imagine for a moment that your mission to the Land of Waves didn't happen."

"But why? What does that eve—"

"Just bear with me for a second," he shushed the boy, stoically, as he held his arms behind his back. "Now... imagine that you are a jonin, and that I just called you to my office to give you a mission."

Naruto easily visualized an older version of himself entering the office. Taller, muscular... a complete badass.

In neon orange.

"It's an A-rank assassination mission, not because of the danger, but because of how well the client paid for the mission. He demands a powerful ninja sure to get the job done, with no chance of failure."

"Sounds like me, hehehe..." Naruto couldn't help the cocky smirk that spread across his lips.

Hiruzen was still very serious. "Your client... is a powerful magnate, owner of a shipping company. His name is Gatou, and your target is a simple bridge builder living in a nearby country, the Land of Waves. A man named Tazuna."

Naruto's smirk violently turned upside-down. Haku had given him a similar scenario, but...

"I believe you know where this is going. So, after entering the country and stalking out the target to guarantee a job well done, you find out about the state of the country and what Tazuna's bridge means to all parties involved. Would you give up on the mission and go back to Konoha, reporting your failure, or do you go through with it?"

As Hiruzen predicted, the answer was immediate.

"Of course I wouldn't do it! It's wrong!" Naruto yelled, repeating the same thing he had told to Haku.

Hiruzen nodded simply, betraying nothing. "If the bridge were to be completed, like it was in reality, old trade routes between Wave and Fire would be reopened, and we'd benefit tremendously on various levels from not aiding Gatou. There's a clause in mission contracts that allows ninjas to abort their mission at any point if said mission would cause a negative impact in Konoha or the Land of Fire in general upon completion, so you'd be free to refuse this as long as you can prove that claim."

Naruto crossed his arms. It took him only a couple seconds of thinking before he threw that notion into the trash can. "What are you trying to say, old man?"

"Now... Gatou was someone who held a lot of power and influence, despite not being a politician," Hiruzen continued. "In this hypothetical scenario, even if the bridge were to be completed, Gatou would still be alive. Despite it being a legitimate breach of contract, someone with a reach as far as Gatou's would be able to spread the word about "how Konoha can't be trusted" among other things. Our village's reputation would take a big hit from your refusal to kill Tazuna... which in turn, would affect many of our most powerful and expensive clients around the country and beyond. Your reputation, too, would be destroyed."

"I still wouldn't do it!" Naruto stomped the floor. "There's no way I'd kill someone innocent because of a greedy scumbag like Gatou!"

"I realize that, Naruto." Hiruzen nodded, glancing at the boy beside him, whose stare was ferocious. "But think about it for a moment. If our main clients start to lose their trust in the village, we'd get fewer mission requests. With fewer missions, we'd earn less income. With less income... how would we sustain things such as the Konoha Hospital, which depends on the public coffers?"

Confusion soon overtook Naruto's anger. "...Huh?"

"If this spark becomes a raging fire, the effects this would have in the population would be massive. Some of the ninjas and other public servants would need to be fired because they cost more too much for us, taxes would need to rise, budgets for our services would become smaller and their quality would inevitably go down, which causes a snowball effect. One that can be very hard for a village to recover from."

It dawned on Naruto, then, why, Hiruzen had him look out the window. _Everything_ revolved around the village: what was good for it and the thousands of families that lived there.

"Our line of work is not an easy one, Naruto. There will be times where you will have to make difficult choices, and sometimes, there will _not_ be a right answer. Especially if you one day end up right there," Hiruzen pointed to the Hokage Monument. "And this is not considering the possibility of a war breaking out. In our little example... I'm absolutely sure that, sooner or later, we'd be weak enough for Kumo or Iwa to wage war on us again."

" _W_... _war_?! Holy shit..."

Seeing that Naruto was becoming rather pale, Hiruzen gently placed his hand on the boy's shoulders and led him back to his chair. "Before we go back to your question about tools... remember that you're still rather young and inexperienced, Naruto. The reality you grew up with here in the Leaf is drastically different than the one in the Mist, where Zabuza and his men lived."

"Oh... I remember Zabuza saying something like that!" Naruto exclaimed, a bit too loudly for Hiruzen's hearing. "About their graduation exam, right?"

"It starts from there," the Hokage nodded as he made his way to his own chair, across from Naruto. "The Mist is famous for intentionally breeding killers, from even before they become genin. That village accepts many assassination missions and for cheaper prices than others—it's their specialty. Our village on the other hand, doesn't deal with those very often. We receive such requests, yes, but we analyze them very thoroughly before considering to accept them. This example I gave you had its purposes, but it's not something I'd ever allow to happen in reality."

"Because you'd try to get info on who Tazuna is?" Naruto guessed.

"That, and it wouldn't be you that I'd choose," Hiruzen clarified, pointing at the boy. "Those kinds of missions are given to people that chose to be assassins for the village. It's not a path we force anyone to take, so there's less of a moral burden on the ninja and more of a guarantee the mission will be done. Provided we accept the request, of course."

"Hmm..." Crossing his arms, Naruto tried to absorb all of that information, but it was a _lot_ to take in.

"Unlike the Hidden Mist," Hiruzen moved to finish his piece, "our village deals with a rather wide variety of mission requests, and few are as grave as assassinations. Such as, for example, escorting civilians across the country, dismantling bandit camps, or capturing dangerous criminals. Knowing this, what answer would you give to the question you asked me?"

Naruto took a moment to narrow his gaze at the Professor for effectively avoiding the question, but complied. It took the boy almost two minutes of silent thinking (which Hiruzen used to get a little bit of paperwork done), but Naruto eventually admitted defeat.

"I... I dunno."

Hiruzen put his pen down. "Exactly."

"...Eh?" Naruto didn't know what to make of Hiruzen's smile.

"When talking about ninjas as tools... the question revolves around how much freedom a ninja has to make their own choices, regardless of what the village needs of them. It changes from village to village, mission to mission, and ninja to ninja. But," the old man's features darkened, "from what you've told me, the case with Zabuza was very different from the normal reality of a ninja, even one from Kiri."

"Uh... r-really?" Naruto stuttered, a bit hesitant by Hiruzen's apparent mood swing.

"Children are easy to mold and to manipulate, Naruto. The boy, Haku, was trapped because he needed to take care of his sister. The girl who unfortunately passed away, however... it is clear to me that Zabuza manipulated her emotions. Where a normal person would have a choice, people like her wouldn't see any other option, because their loyalty binds them to only one choice in certain situations. In this case... they are more like puppets than tools, if you ask me, regardless if the "user" cares about them or not."

For a few brief moments, Hiruzen simmered on his own bitter regret as the ugly reality born out trusting one of his closest comrades resurfaced in his mind to haunt him. ROOT was still a sore spot for the Professor... especially with his growing suspicions that one Danzo Shimura had only moved his operations deeper into the shadows, rather than ending them entirely.

When he snapped out of his reverie, he saw something very familiar: Naruto's face all scrunched up as he tried to make sense of everything he heard, to little success. It gave Hiruzen a sense of nostalgia, as he had seen that expression very often on Naruto's face when he taught the boy how to read and write at a basic level, years ago.

"Ah... forgive me, Naruto" Hiruzen sighed, shaking his head at his own foolishness. "You are still just a genin—you shouldn't be worrying about these kinds of difficult concepts and situations just yet. I suppose I went a little too far with my ramblings, haven't I?"

"Uh? Oh, nonono!" Naruto waved his hands wildly in denial. "It's cool! I mean... yeah, I guess I'm a little bit lost... but it did help clear my head a little. I'm glad we had this talk, you know?" he confessed with a small, soft smile.

Hiruzen reflected that, initially, but his smile soon gained an edge of teasing. "Oh, you're glad we had a talk... now that's rare! You're usually so grouchy when we have these one-on-ones."

"Hmph, that's all _your_ fault for not seeing how genius my pranks are!" Naruto snapped... until Hiruzen began to snicker, and Naruto couldn't help but join the old Hokage for a good laugh.

It wasn't much, really, but it did manage to dissolve the heavy atmosphere that their conversation had brought into the room.

"But, seriously," the Uzumaki began. "Thanks for talking with me, old man."

"It is only my duty," Hiruzen replied with a small smirk. "Now then... I suppose that's all for now, correct?"

"Yeah," Naruto rose. "So you'll call us later to get the money from the mission, right?"

"Yes, just come back three days from now and I'll have your money. And don't waste it all in ramen!" Hiruzen scolded preemptively.

"Ramen is not a waste! But okay, whatever." With a dismissive but enthusiastic wave, Naruto made to leave the room. "Bye!"

"Oh, before you go," Hiruzen called him, "please tell that boy, Haku, that I'll call him in a few minutes. I think these old bones of mines need a small break!"

Rolling his eyes at the old man's laughter, Naruto grunted something about smoking under his breath and left the room.

The door closed, isolating Hiruzen from the world if only for a few minutes. The old Kage gladly made use of the chance and slumped in his chair, heaving a weary sigh as he closed his eyes and allowed his mind to rest for a moment.

He needed that little break from his own thought. Being reminded of ROOT was a sure way to ruin Hiruzen's mood, as the Hokage within him couldn't help but ponder once again if his investigations on the matter could be trusted. He had quite a few spy reports about ROOT after he ordered for the organization's dismantlement, and while they all confirmed that Danzo had done as he had told... Hiruzen had always doubted it.

His gut didn't let him believe it, and he wasn't the only one. Kakashi had come to him more than once to report on the suspicious behavior of some ex-ROOT ninja who were integrated into the ANBU, but if ROOT still existed, Danzo had hid his tracks well. It didn't help that Danzo had convinced him—for security reasons, he had argued—to keep ROOT undocumented and effectively nonexistent as far as the Leaf's own document archives were concerned.

It didn't take a lot of effort to hide a ghost.

"I am too old for this shit."

Giving up on that train of thought once again, Hiruzen grabbed his pipe and rose from the chair, making his way to one of the nearby windows.

While his old habit of smoking was useful to clear his mind for a couple minutes, once the old man's eyes landed on the Fourth Hokage's stone head, a different and just as troublesome thought started to bother him.

Despite what he had spent time talking about with Kurenai, he supposed nobody could escape their doubts over past decisions. It was simply human nature, and though one of his monikers was "The God of Shinobi", Hiruzen knew he hadn't attained godhood just yet.

In all of his years as Hokage... this was the first time in his career that Hiruzen found himself questioning how he built a genin squad. Each year, Hiruzen had to go over the academy reports on each student, hear the class's main teacher's opinion on each student, and carefully look over his roster of available jonin that were eligible for the role of sensei. Usually that combination of factors didn't weigh on his mind, but this time he couldn't help but wonder.

Team 7 had been an easy squad to build, really.

The policy of grouping the top two students of the year with the worst one tended to work very well, in Hiruzen's experience. That setup allows the jonin-sensei to give a little more attention to the student that struggled the most in the academy without really affecting the other, more advanced genin in the "safe" period of working through D-rank missions. The two top genin could also help their remaining teammates to keep growing even without their sensei's help, too.

Having the jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi and the last Uchiha in the same team made it impossible to have anyone but Kakashi Hatake as their teacher. He was one of the precious few able to intervene if the Kyuubi threatened to break free, and also the only one that could teach Sasuke about his Sharingan, once it awakened.

Having those three individuals in the same squad was a very alluring idea to him, as a Hokage. They had the potential to make an _extremely_ powerful assault squad... but it was the fourth element, Sakura Haruno, who now caused Hiruzen to doubt himself.

Iruka Umino, the sensei in charge of Naruto's class, knew very well which of his students would become the top two and dead last and made it a point to note that having Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura all in the same team would be, in his words, a complete disaster.

He noted that there was a love triangle between them, made of two strong but unrequited and superficial crushes, with hatred and deep dislike filling all the other blanks in their dynamics. On top of it, all three of them were impatient hotheads—even if Sasuke usually could keep himself in check. Hiruzen had seen the chunin's point, but he also saw a chance to motivate Kakashi to teach that specific squad. Those three eerily resembled Kakashi's old team, even if they were far more volatile. It had everything to work once they got past their differences, matured and got to truly know each other as time passed.

But Hiruzen had briefly considered another Team 7, which Iruka himself had suggested: Naruto Uzumaki, Sasuke Uchiha... and Hinata Hyuuga.

Hiruzen had to admit the chunin made a compelling argument. Iruka believed that Hinata was the right person to deal the flames caused by Naruto and Sasuke's constant bickering, as the girl was more likely to try to stop them from fighting rather than always picking a side and adding fuel to the fire or letting it burn freely. A Hyuuga as part of an assault squad was also a very interesting idea that provided the team with a tracker that, unlike Kakashi, did not require the highly draining summoning jutsu to do that job.

The true kicker was the girl's personality and the dynamic she, supposedly, would bring to the team. According to both what he had read from Iruka and what he had gathered from the few times he had seen the girl in previous trips to the Hyuuga Compound, Hinata was a kind and gentle child who would be more suited to the role of emotional support that Sasuke and Naruto would need, when compared to Sakura. And while she herself was in need of emotional support due to her cripplingly low self-esteem and shyness... Iruka had reported that the blue-haired girl seemed to have a crush on Naruto of all people.

The plan was that having those two in the same team would help Hinata overcome her issues by interacting with Naruto, while also helping the boy to form a bond with someone that genuinely wanted to be his friend. The fact that she didn't have an obsessive crush on Sasuke like every other girl in her class and didn't seem to envy him like all of the boys increased her chances of becoming friends with the brooding Uchiha, who reacted very negatively to that kind of attention.

While all of that made sense, Hinata was the only Hyuuga of her class and thus the only one that could complete a tracking squad with Shino and Kiba. None of the trio's tracking abilities were perfect on their own, but putting them all together while backed up by an experienced tracked and illusionist like Kurenai... Hiruzen wasn't willing to part with that idea. Sakura undoubtedly would've become a fearsome genjutsu specialist like Kurenai, but that created a redundancy in the team's skillset. Kakashi, on the other hand, would be able to direct the girl in various other directions depending on her own choices.

What had also made Hiruzen opt to ignore Iruka's suggestion was, in a way, the very foundations of his arguments. Hinata was someone that had deeper issues than a normal civilian girl like Sakura, and her role as the emotional pillar of the team would rely on her being able to overcome those issues in a timely fashion. Hiruzen feared that the girl could end up retracting even deeper into her shell when faced with Naruto and Sasuke's constant conflicts and her own perceived weakness; Kakashi didn't have the tools to deal with that kind of personality, unlike Kurenai, who could also provide the care the girl so obviously didn't receive in her own household. Sasuke was unlikely to help her on his own and Naruto's social unawareness could lead to misunderstandings—which they did in reality, from the boy's retelling of their interactions in Wave.

Hiruzen's other fear was that Hinata's presence on the team could create an even worse dynamic between Sasuke and Naruto. While there was a love triangle in the Team 7 he ultimately went with, its foundation was on superficial crushes. Hiruzen was sure that they would go away in time... but not as much with the arrangement Iruka suggested.

He saw the potential danger that it would be if the constant exposure to Hinata's gentle and supportive nature caused both Sasuke and Naruto to fall for her. Both boys grew up alone and could end up latching on a person that offered a genuine escape from that, which would be the recipe for a disaster. He had seen, a few times, squads falling apart due to love, and considering both of the boys had a risk factor—the curse of hatred and the Kyuubi's influence—it was too risky of a bet for Hiruzen to make.

But as much as he saw the doubts that troubled Naruto as he spoke about the shy Hyuuga, Hiruzen also saw a spark in the boy's blue eyes. As confused as Naruto ended up being by the girl's actions, Hiruzen knew he was thrilled by the chance of connecting with someone who liked him, even if he didn't realize the underlying crush she obviously had on him. The sentimental fool within Hiruzen wondered if perhaps he had made another mistake in keeping Naruto away from the one person he knew hadn't been affected by the fear and hatred the older generations imparted to the younger ones. After all, Hiruzen knew he had failed Naruto once before by creating a law that was meant to protect him... and ultimately condemned him to a childhood of loneliness.

That brief interaction by his doorstep had shown him the merit of having those two on the same squad, and Hiruzen now wondered if he really should've maintained his idea of having Naruto and Sasuke together. Unlike with the Uchiha, there had been another person who could become Naruto's sensei, and swapping Naruto and Shino around was not completely unviable.

Shadow Clones are versatile enough to validate Naruto's inclusion in a tracking squad, and even if they were inferior to an Aburame's kikaichu, he would've made the team more equipped to handle eventual conflicts, be it by fighting or fleeing. Shino wouldn't provide much raw power to an assault squad, but his abilities were could still cause widespread havoc to assist his teammates during fights, while his stealthy tracking abilities could provide new combat strategies for a squad originally built for all-out offense...

Shaking his head, the old man removed his pipe from his lips and breathed out a puff of smoke.

"Humans sure are a funny bunch."

Despite his words to Kurenai about choice and regret, here he was, doing the same thing he had advised her against. And much like he had also advised Naruto against, here he was, worrying about a problem that was set to solve itself on its own, thanks to his educational project.

Resolving to leave the past in the past, Hiruzen decided to stop worrying and watch. He had made his fair share of bad decisions in his past, but he had a feeling that this one... this was the exact opposite.

* * *

Naruto had to give Hiruzen's secretary some credit. Yes, the old witch made no efforts to hide just how badly she despised him, but unlike many others he had met, she didn't let personal feelings get in the way of doing her job. He needed directions, and she gave him directions. Nothing more, nothing less.

Following her curt but simple words, Naruto found himself walking up the stairs that led to the Hokage Tower's rooftop, where Haku was supposed to be. And while a small part of Naruto was wary and considered the possibility that he had been tricked, he found Haku near the edge of the rooftop, head raised towards the Hokage Monument that loomed over the village. The Ice-user was probably lost in thought again, Naruto realized, but he quickly turned around from the sound of Naruto's footsteps.

In his left hand, he still held Haru's diary... and in the other, a fistful of needles. Naruto had to take a step back when he saw the other boy's aggressive stance and weapons, but Haku relaxed when he realized who was there.

"Oh! Naruto-san... I didn't know it was you," Haku said, apologetically, while hiding his needles back within his sleeve—Naruto had no idea how that worked.

"It's fine," Naruto waved him off. "I just came here to tell you that the old—I mean, the Hokage will see you in a couple minutes. He's just taking a little break now."

"Ah... I see."

"So whatcha doing out here?" Naruto blurted out as he approached, making Haku smile at his unrestrained curiosity, and then at the blond's scowl as a rather cold breeze passed by. "I know those chairs downstairs are not that great, but its way better than having to deal with this wind."

"Well, perhaps," Haku tucked a stray lock of hair behind his ear. "I am used to the cold, but it is getting rather late, isn't it?"

Naruto looked at the sky, surprised. He had lost track of the time, but the sun was almost setting already. The trip from Wave to the Leaf still took a few hours, even without a civilian slowing them down. Since they had left the country only after lunch, it was no wonder that it was almost nightfall.

"But to answer your question... I was just thinking about a few things while appreciating the view," Haku confessed, turning his back on Naruto and gazing at the four stone heads up above again. "Your village is beautiful, but this monument is simply breathtaking. Clearly, there was a lot of care put into it."

Naruto found himself nodding to that. "Yeah, I've seen it up close. They really went all out with it... but it's missing something, you know?" Haku briefly turned around only to see the cockiest of grins plastered across Naruto's face. "It ain't perfect till my head is up there too!"

Haku had to hold back a laugh at how excited Naruto was. "You did say something about becoming Hokage before. I assume that's your dream?"

"Yup!"

"But... you know it's not that easy, right?" Haku asked, growing serious. "I don't mean achieving just your dream, but actually _being_ the Hokage."

Naruto's smile disappeared. "Yeah... I know. I was talking about that just now with the old man, actually. I... I admit I don't know or understand everything about being a Hokage, but I still want the hat, you know?"

"And why is that, if you don't mind me asking?"

"...At first I only wanted to be Hokage, because that'd mean I was really strong. I wanted to be a hero, and... well, I still do. But," he raised his finger, pointing to the diary Haku still held. "I met her in the woods a few days before the bridge, and it's funny, she actually asked me this stuff too. She told me that I shouldn't become strong just to for the sake of it, but that I should be strong to protect the people who are the most important to me, and... I kinda like that idea, you know?"

Turning around slightly, Naruto's blue eyes wandered around the village, and so did his mind.

So many things had happened these past few weeks, and even if not all of them were pleasant, Naruto was happy that he lived through them. He had seen what happened to people when the bonds they forged with others collapsed... from Sasuke's obsession with revenge to Inari's shattered hopes, from Haru's attempt to kill herself to the fear that tormented him that week at the thought of how his friends would react if Hinata spilled the beans about the Kyuubi.

But as he formed more bonds and found new meaning in old ones, he realized how important that concept is—the power that something as simple as a friendship could have.

How precious another life could be to someone.

"Naruto-san," Haku eventually broke the silence that formed between them. "Just... keep in mind that's not all there is to it."

"What are you talking about?" Naruto frowned slightly.

"Because of our circumstances, my sister's views were very limited. She had the right idea, but her focus was only on Zabuza and me... her family, as shoddy as it was. Everyone else simply didn't matter."

Naruto's eyebrows rose. _'Family? Is... that what she was trying to say back then?'_

If that was the case, it was no wonder that he felt he had missed something important. The only bonds he had that were close to something like family were with Hiruzen and Iruka, but neither could really give him the constant attention and unconditional love that he saw parents giving to their kids and vice-versa, whenever he passed by such families in the village.

"You see, Naruto-san," Haku continued, "everyone that is precious to you, even in small ways... they have precious people of their own too. Every life is important in its own way. You can't just focus on your little circle."

"Hmm... true," Naruto scratched his chin. "True. But hey, if it's about protecting everyone..." he grinned widely again. "That's all the more reason for me to become Hokage, dontcha think?"

Haku barely had the chance to open his mouth to reply when a small cloud of smoke blew up nearby, revealing a lizard-masked ANBU.

"Hokage-sama is ready to see you."

"Oh! Of course, I'll be there soon." Haku went to bow, but the ANBU disappeared before he could. Shrugging, the Haku shifted to face his only other companion. "Naruto-san, it was a pleasure to talk with you."

"Uh... sure?" Naruto laughed awkwardly, feeling embarrassed somehow as he watched Haku leave.

However, the Ice-user turned back before he reached the stairs.

"I don't know if we will meet again, so I'll just say that I truly hope that one day you'll achieve your dream, Naruto-san. Our world needs more people that think like you do. Even... if that and the way our world works are at odds."

Haku had just expected a smile or some other sort of cheerful reply, but Naruto's features tightened, and Haku could see the boy's determination shining brightly in his blue eyes.

"The old man told me that things in your country are different, you know? And that even here, sometimes bad stuff can happen... but if that's the way our world works, then _screw that!_ " he roared. "That's not the way I work, and that's not how things will work when I become Hokage either!"

"...It's not going to be easy," Haku warned him once again, but Naruto just shook his head.

"I know, but I don't care how hard it will be! Listen: I _never_ give up. I'll keep trying until I find a way, because that's how I do things! That's my _ninja_ way of doing things!"

Once again, Haku sensed something akin to an aura of sorts surrounding Naruto as he spoke. Perhaps it was his mind playing tricks on him, or the setting sun that was casting a powerful light from one direction and leaving the other in shadows... Haku didn't know. But it was overpowering, and as crazy as it sounded, Haku found his doubts in Naruto's odds of success being washed away completely.

Somehow, someday... he'd find a way to do it. It brought a smile to Haku's lips.

"...I shouldn't keep Hokage-sama waiting," the Yuki eventually said. "I hope we will meet again, Naruto-san!"

Waving goodbye one last time, Haku went down the stairs, leaving Naruto by himself.

The blond turned around and looked at the streets below once again. Few of the villagers could actually stand him—he had no reason to protect or care about those people.

But he loved this village with all of his heart. How couldn't he? From the forests to the crowded marketplaces, from his favorite ramen stand to the lone swing near the academy grounds, from the Hokage Monument to the hot springs... this was home. His home!

And even if those people continued to dislike him, to hate him, to ignore him... he would give his all to protect the village and those dear to him.

"If Iruka-sensei knew about the fox and changed his mind... if Hinata discovered everything but didn't care... then I've still got a chance!"

His fists clenched. Things would change.

And he wouldn't give up until then.

* * *

A/N:

Whew!

This chapter wasn't my biggest, but it was pretty tough to write despite all that I had planned. Those conversations were pretty difficult!

As you can see, this is from where Naruto officially gets his "ninja" way in my fic (which made that part a bit too corny for my tastes but I couldn't get around that). All these talks about tools, puppets, and the way the world works will make an impact in forming Naruto's thought process later on, considering the major villains of the future arcs and also the figure of Jiraiya, who will give him even more to think about in terms of how the world works. He now has a few different perspectives to work with and, yes... everything isn't as easy as he had thought it would be (or more accurately, he didn't think about those things), but he'd be dammed if something as simple as playing on the hardest difficult and going for the best rank is going to stop him!

The little OC I built for this chapter, the nameless secretary, will show up a couple chapters in the future but she is not really important herself, hence why I chose not to focus on describing her. You will get a little piece about it next chapter. Blame _Perentie Fan_ for her existence, haha.

You guys probably can guess it, but the dilemma of when and how to talk about the Kyuubi to his non-Hinata friends will be a big issue for Naruto going forward. The emotional stakes for Naruto are a lot higher than in canon now (he's kinda vulnerable atm, as I'm sure everyone noticed), but luckily he can count on a few people like Hiruzen and Hinata, right?

...I honestly don't know what to think of this chapter in terms of quality. Does this suck? Is it average, or perhaps a good chapter? My Beta thought it was amazing, but this chapter accidentally really focused on why kid!SimplePotato liked Naruto as a series in the first place and, as he himself said, I can't exactly trust his nostalgia-induced opinion. He gave this chapter a 9,6/10 if you can believe that... and it was an older version full of mistakes, even!

So.. hearing your thoughts would be nice! A Review can really brighten an author's spirits. It seriously helps us to work on our fics, and having an actual idea of how well I did this time around would be nice too!

As for the next chapter—Hinata's side of this day, starting from a little after she left—it's something I've got on my mind for a long while but I already know it will be very troublesome to write. I don't know which side of the equation will win out when I do start writing it, and between the length and college being college... I'm hoping for a late May update, but am expecting to drop it mid-June. No promises, tho.

Finally, thanks to SimplePotato for beta'ing this for me, even if I had to let him play the first few hours of the new Zelda so that he could actually be bothered to help me. Nohrian Scum. Extra shout outs to _**Serious Sam**_ and _ **Ander Arias**_ for giving me extra opinions about my content and decision to split things up. I've already talked about their fics here ( **My Precious People** and **Son of the Sannin** respectively) **,** so if you haven't read them just yet... what is _wrong_ with you? Review this chapter and go read their work!

Oh, I should also thank _**Theblueswordsman**_ for the shout out in their fic, **Uzumaki Naruto Chronicles Rewrite**. Thanks!

See you guys later!

* * *

Changelog:

1.0 to 1.0.1 (04/22/17)

A few typos that _gio08_ pointed out got hunted down and executed with extreme prejudice. As well as another typo that was very close to one of those.

1.0.1 to 1.0.2 (02/07/17)

Modified a couple sections to add the forgotten backpacks to match the next/previous chapter's continuity, and added a little bit to Kurenai's exit.


	19. Chapter 19 - Guiding Light (Moon)

Yo!

I must say that I never expected such a positive reaction from the last chapter, haha. Thank you all for the kind words, my reviewers! I'm sorry my retribution was this delay, but I had to focus on my studies. (paid off really well, btw).

So those that have seen my profile and got e-mails/did some math probably realized this is a double-update in the making. Unlike Naruto's chapter, this one has events on the day after the teams return from Wave. It got big enough I decided to split it for your reading convenience, since both halves stand for different days and different atmospheres. Much like in Naruto's half—now third—of the intermission, I severely underestimated how much some of these scenes required of me, and _Perentie Fan's_ idea from earlier brought about a new (big) issue I needed to address, so this got out of hand planning-wise.

I had gotten lax with my schedule since college was over, and I thought: so what if I have to edit this in the middle of the week? ...Between job interviews and medical check-ups, that turned out to be my undoing, which is why I'm sending this part. (+ SimplePotato having college issues)

There's a couple changes to previous chapters that I must bring to your attention. The first is a micro "plothole" last chapter: pretty much everyone besides Hiruzen and the secretary had a backpack either on their backs, or near where they were sitting as mentioned in C17. C18 matches that continuity, as these items are referenced here. (Unlike in their trip to Wave, they weren't expecting an attack, so sealing the packs was not needed.)

The second, is that I decided to get rid of some allusions to The Last's non-flashback events in the end of Hinata's dream _way_ back, in Chapter 2. I'm toying with some new ideas and decided to not lock myself into following a specific path for those events just yet. Neither change warrants a re-read of the chapters, but I thought it best to notify you all.

Moving on, part of this chapter happens in the living room of Sakura's house. There's some artwork of the place made for the Road to Ninja movie and it's shown in the pre-movie anime episode if you want the full picture painted in your mind. Similarly, I'll be describing a bit more of Hinata's bedroom this time around but not fully, and you can check Shippuden episode 306 to see what it looks like if you need it.

It won't be too long—hopefully just a couple days—until the next update goes live, but I hope you'll enjoy this one!

* * *

 _Intermission_

Guiding Light (Moon) [Current Version: 1.0]

* * *

While Kurenai and Naruto had remained inside the Hokage Tower to speak with Hiruzen, the other members of Team 7 and 8 had split off into two groups at the tower's entrance, much like they had right after meeting Tazuna weeks prior.

Kakashi, as ordered by the Hokage, headed to the hospital with Kiba and Sasuke while Shino tagged along simply because his home was in the same direction. Similarly, because the Hyuuga compound was in the same direction as the Haruno household, Hinata found herself accompanying Sakura after splitting off from her team.

On one hand, it was a convenient thing for Hinata. Even if she had the focus to do otherwise, it was much easier to just barely keep her friend's pink hair in her sights and follow Sakura through the partially crowded streets of the village than paying attention to the path herself. But on the other hand, that offered Hinata no escape from her angered thoughts.

She simply couldn't get what happened in the Hokage's tower out of her mind.

Even if they had interacted only for a minute, that old lady had been so nice to her... only to turn around and treat Naruto with such a complete disregard, as if he were trash rather than an actual human being. As if he had done something wrong.

"Whew, I can see it already!"

No. Hinata had the feeling that the secretary considered Naruto's _existence_ as something wrong.

It made her blood _boil_ , even more so when the secretary then seemed confused as to why Hinata was upset right afterwards, as if there had been no possible reason to explain her reaction to what had just transpired. The secretary had even thought she had been sick!

It was actually true, in a way. Disgusted was probably the better word, but sick fit the bill just as well. How someone could treat another person like that was just beyond her comprehension.

"Um... Hinata?"

But perhaps the most maddening of all... was that she had scared Naruto. The same Naruto that had gone as far as trying to spit on the face of Zabuza Momochi while pinned to a tree, almost cowering at the glare of an elderly civilian woman. The idea was almost hilarious, really. But for Naruto to react in _that_ way... Hinata couldn't see another explanation. That seemingly kind old lady had the audacity to terrorize a much younger Naruto, just a frail boy that didn't know how to defend himself. And that had stuck with him even years later.

It hit a little too close to home.

 _'How can someone like her sleep at night, knowing they are tormenting a child?'_

Hinata didn't know how she'd even _live_ with herself, if she had done something like that. It's simply evil.

"Hey, Hinata. Are you listening to me?"

With Naruto's story still simmering in her mind, her pale eyes darted from the streets to the people passing through. Some were already going back to their homes after another day of hard work, while others, like the nearby shopkeepers, were still giving it their all to attract whatever potential customers they could find.

 _'I wonder how many of these people are like that secretary... people who walk around the village freely, even though they deserve—'_

"Hinata!"

With a squeak, Hinata felt something pulling her by the hood of her thick jacket.

Her head jerked backwards and she turned around on instinct, only to find an upset-looking Sakura.

"S-Sakura-san?" she spluttered dumbly. _'When did she get behind me? We were walking almost side-by-side!'_

"Sheesh... I was trying to talk with you, but you weren't listening." The pinkette's hands moved to rest on her hips and her expression turned into one of worry. "You didn't even notice I stopped walking, Hinata."

Burning with shame, Hinata was about to apologize when she and Sakura both noticed a few people around them staring.

Sakura refocused on her friend. "Look, come on," she called, grabbing Hinata's hand and quickly pulling her towards a nearby building.

"Sakura-san?! _Ah!_ " Hinata stumbled but managed to keep up with the other girl's pace. "W-Where are we going?!"

She didn't get an answer until they were already inside the building, running up a set of stairs before Sakura stopped in front of a small metal gate and released her hand.

The pinkette dropped her backpack to the ground and dug inside it for a few seconds, before retrieving a set of keys and smiling at Hinata. "To my place!"

 _'She lives here? Oh,'_ she cringed. _' So that's why she stopped earlier...'_

Sakura unlocked the gate. "C'mon in!" she said in a sweet, inviting tone that made refusing her impossible for Hinata.

While her friend locked the gate, Hinata's eyes adjusted to the building's lack of light and found another set of stairs further ahead.

It was almost as if Sakura knew Hinata's legs ached at the sight. "Don't worry, I live on the second floor!"

With that said, she rushed upstairs ahead of Hinata, who lingered by the gate uneasily.

It would be rude to say no and walk away, of course, so she soon bolted after Sakura. That brought a problem of its own, however.

"Um... will your parents be okay with this? I mean, it's all so sudden..."

Hinata herself had no idea she'd end up there until she was already at the doorstep, after all.

"It's fine! They aren't home yet," Sakura argued as she unlocked another door—one made of wood. "Or, at least they _shouldn't_."

Sakura shouted for her parents just to be sure once the door swung open.

"...Nope. Nobody home. Even if they were, I'm sure they wouldn't mind." Saying that, Sakura disappeared inside the house's living room while unstrapping her backpack and leaving it by the door before Hinata had even entered.

Hinata stepped inside and closed the door for her forgetful friend. The sound of another door opening and a brief glance told her Sakura went to a nearby room—likely the kitchen.

"I'll be with you in just a bit," she called out. "Feel free to sit anywhere you want!"

After standing around awkwardly for a few seconds, Hinata made her way to the nearby couch and used the chance to scan her surroundings. It was a rather simple room when compared to what she was used to, but a fair bit more modern as well. A small square table with three chairs was in the center, with doors and shelves filling the walls of the room. She even spotted a telephone on a small stand in the corner, with the glass doors that led to the small balcony right beside it, which also allowed Hinata to take a peek at the street below and nearby buildings.

"Sorry for the wait," Sakura said as she came back to the living room. In her hands she had two glass cups, both filled almost to the brim with water. "Here; drink this."

Hinata hadn't even asked for water, but accepted it anyways out of politeness.

"My mom works as a hospital clerk on the night shift and my dad's store hasn't closed just yet, so it's just us for now," Sakura explained, before downing her cup of water practically in one gulp. "Hmm! _Delicious_... I needed that."

Hinata was barely listening as she drank from her own cup, but she agreed wholeheartedly with that last part. The cool liquid slipped down her throat, satiating a thirst Hinata had been too furious to notice she had been feeling. The sensation was so delightfully pleasant that it completely cleared her mind, if only for a few seconds.

" _Ahh_... thank you, Sakura-san." She offered the empty cup back to Sakura.

Nodding, her friend placed the cups on the center of the table and then leaned against it, using her hands to prop herself up.

"So... have you calmed down?"

"...Yeah." Hinata had briefly considered playing dumb, but... _'I wasn't even trying to hide it, I think.'_

"Good! You know," Sakura smiled teasingly, "I felt as if I was walking with Sasuke-kun back there."

Hinata winced. "...T-That bad?"

"Yeah," Sakura snorted. "So, what's up? Besides the storm cloud above your head, I mean?"

"..Heh," Hinata smiled a little, but it went away too fast for Sakura's liking.

The pinkette moved to sit beside Hinata. "Do you want to talk about it?" she rephrased her offer, gently.

Hinata only wished she could take her up on that. "No... i-it was nothing, really."

And ultimately... wasn't that the truth?

Seeing people mistreating Naruto was not something new to her, but knowing why they did it gave her a fighting chance. Or, at least, that's what she had wanted to believe after Naruto told her the truth.

But the reality was that nothing changed. All she was able to do was watch idly, like always. Naruto had smiled at her in the end, as if to say that it was fine, that he would forgive her for being such a failure... but she couldn't forgive herself that easily.

"Hmm... are you sure?" Sakura crossed her arms and kept staring, hoping that Hinata would crack under the pressure.

The Hyuuga only fidgeted uncomfortably, knowing her friend didn't believe her, but held silent and looked away.

"Alright then," Sakura gave up with a small sigh. "I was just surprised to see something ruining your good mood like that. I mean, considering what happened between you and _Naruto_ today," she lightly elbowed her friend, wiggling her eyebrows.

Of course, the first thing Hinata had done after she and Naruto arrived at Tazuna's was to pull Sakura aside to give her friend a "status report". She hadn't said anything about Naruto's secrets, obviously... but Sakura was aware of almost everything else.

That conversation involved a lot more high-pitched squeals than Hinata's pride allowed her to admit.

"I'm not sure I told you this earlier, but I'm really happy that you managed to patch things up with that knucklehead," Sakura continued. "Proud, too."

Sakura's words caused an impossibly silly smile to adorn Hinata's lightly rosed face—signs that the pinkette's plan to cheer up her friend was working perfectly.

"I'm really happy too, Sakura-san. But... I couldn't have done it without you and everyone else." Without an ounce of hesitation, Hinata's hands reached for Sakura's left hand. "Thank you for helping me."

" _Aww_... stop that." Sakura's other hand moved to join its sibling with Hinata's. "We just gave you a little push, really. The rest was all you!"

That little moment of bonding lasted only a couple seconds before Sakura slumped completely in her seat, groaning. "But I wish things were going as well on my end. Ugh..."

Memories of Sakura's wail of frustration over a certain Uchiha's stubbornness earlier that day filled Hinata's mind.

"Sasuke-kun has been talking to me sometimes, which I guess is a pretty nice improvement. But he's been so... so _cranky_ lately!" Sakura groaned in frustration. "You'd think _he_ was the one with PMS here..."

Hinata almost groaned too. _'This again? What's with these people today?'_

"That book you helped me pick for him helped for a while, but he got through it way too fast," Sakura continued.

"Well... it's not like there are many options when you are confined to a bed," Hinata said. She could still remember how restless she had felt during their first day in Wave, which she had spent chained to Tsunami's bed thanks to Zabuza breaking her legs. Her book certainly had been useful, even if she had nothing to practice what she learned about knitting at the time...

"Yeah... I guess you have a point," Sakura huffed. "But I'm actually surprised he swallowed his not-small ego and asked Kakashi-sensei to give him a piggyback ride back here just to get his legs healed properly."

Hinata had to admit, that had caught her off-guard as well. Sasuke had _fervently_ refused to get any help during the past week and insisted on doing everything himself, even when it came to bathroom activities. Hinata had no idea how he actually managed to bathe properly—she had needed Kurenai to help her.

It had been quite embarrassing, but Kurenai had done her best to make her as comfortable with the situation as possible. It actually felt good to be treated with such care, if Hinata was to be entirely honest. _.._ but she couldn't imagine _Kakashi_ doing the same for Sasuke. _'Or for anyone.'_

"He's probably dying to get back to training," Sakura continued, sitting upright once more. "I bet you all my mission money that's exactly what he'll do these next three days."

"Sasuke-san is very committed," Hinata nodded. She had never watched Sasuke train as she had done for Naruto, but she could still recall Sasuke's words—his tone—when he spoke about his brother while they were headed to Wave. "People call him a genius, but... I think he only got this far because of how seriously he takes his training."

Sakura smirked. "Heh... honestly? You're not wrong, but I think right now it's more about not letting Naruto and Kiba catch up to him than anything else," Sakura snorted. "He gives this air of maturity, but he can be so childish sometimes that it's almost cute. In the end he's just as competitively silly as the others," she giggled, making Hinata laugh a bit as well.

Hinata found it amusing that they are pursuing a big dream, but on the short term, it was the simple desire to one-up each other that kept them was sure they didn't even notice it. _'Well, not all boys,_ she amended in her mind. _' Shino-kun doesn't seem to care much about that.'_

Hearing Sakura sighing softly beside her snapped Hinata from her thoughts.

"Despite what I said, I think I'm going to do the exact same thing these next few days."

"You mean training?"

"Yeah," Sakura nodded. "Between normal physical training and the stuff our sensei gave us, there's actually a lot to do. But I'm actually going to focus more on the elemental training; I feel like I'm _really_ close to getting it right," she said, bringing her thumb and pointer together.

"I... I think I'm the same with my Water chakra training. It still drips quite a bit and the shape... d-doesn't resemble a bowl very well, but I'm close too. I think I can do it by the end of the week," Hinata smiled, feeling prideful and confident for once. "I do wonder what kind of jutsu Kakashi-sensei will give us for my first scrolls afterwards, though."

Her pale lavender eyes gleamed as they shifted to the empty cups on the table. "Kakashi-sensei said Water has various defensive and support techniques, so I'm expecting that kind of jutsu... but since Shino-kun fills that role in our team and I rely so much on the Gentle Fist, I think he might give me an offensive technique like a projectile, or maybe an all-purpose jutsu like the Water Clone."

In her excitement, Hinata failed to see Sakura's expression faltering as she spoke.

"I just hope mine will be something that can help me be useful, for once..."

The bitterness in her voice caught\ Hinata completely off-guard. "Sakura-san? What are you saying...?!"

"Come on, Hinata. You know that I barely helped during the mission," Sakura's head lowered, gaze trained at her lap. "Yeah, there was that fight with the Demon Brothers, but it wasn't like that mattered in the end. If something had gone wrong our sensei would've stepped in. Besides that fight... I either did nothing or, worse, just got in the way. I was useless practically the entire time."

Frowning with worry, Hinata placed her hand on Sakura's shoulder. "Sakura-san, you're being silly."

"Si... _silly_ _?!_ " Sakura stammered, and Hinata could almost see the lit fuse on her friend's head as she turned to her.

"Didn't you just say that our boys are silly because of how they are so competitive? You're doing the same thing. You're thinking of "how much" you did and are comparing yourself to others."

Sakura just kept staring blankly in response, eerily resembling Naruto in Hinata's opinion.

"...That doesn't change anything," the pinkette eventually retorted. "I passed out without contributing in any way when we fought Zabuza, and I didn't even get to fight on the bridge."

"Maybe you didn't do much," Hinata calmly agreed, "but Sakura-san, what you did was still important. You just didn't get to see it."

Sakura scowled. "What are you getting at?"

"Look at the bigger picture," Hinata answered with a small smile, retracting her hand. "With Zabuza... yes, you fainted. But you helped buy us a couple seconds. Zabuza had been about to start killing us when our sensei showed up—every little moment we made him waste mattered! And on the bridge... if I had arrived just a little later than I did, Kiba-kun would've lost against that masked girl. Shino-kun helped make those Earth weapons too, but I'd have wasted too much time to get the three weapons I needed just from him, even if... that first one you made wasn't, er, u-usable," she finished with a small blush at the memory.

Sakura managed to ignore that last bit as she took in her friend's words, features softening as she did so.

"Man... you really are something, you know that?" Sakura chuckled a bit. "I brought you here to cheer you up, and in the end it was you who cheered me up!

"Ah... s-sorry," Hinata mumbled in response as she looked away, ashamed of how inconsiderate she had been earlier

Sakura just poked her in the rib, making the girl yelp. "Now who's being silly? What have I told you about using that word with me?"

Hinata opened her mouth but snapped her jaw shut immediately.

"Good girl! You're learning!"

They both laughed for a moment, and Sakura rose from the couch.

"You know what, I might even have a treat for you," she smirked. "I saw a fancy-looking chocolate cake when I went into the kitchen just now... want some?"

Hinata couldn't deny something like that even if she tried to. "Is it a plain cake or that kind with melted chocolate on top?"

Sakura smirked.

"On top _and_ inside."

* * *

The two girls spent the next few minutes stuffing their faces with cake and chatting about minor trivialities. But after finishing her third (generously thick) slice of cake and downing another cup of water, Hinata decided to be a hypocrite and risked ruining the pleasant mood that she and her friend had fallen into.

"I... I know I don't really have a right to ask this," she acknowledged, wiping her face with a napkin, "but what was that all about?"

The pinkette's shot a nasty yeah-you-don't look at her, making it evident she knew exactly what "that" meant. But she, unlike Hinata, decided to get it off her chest.

It began with a sigh.

"I didn't tell you this before, but back at the bridge I had... another freak-out. When the mist started to vanish and I saw Sasuke-kun on the floor, looking like a bloody porcupine."

"But... uh, that was a week ago, Sakura-san."

"Yeah, but these?" Sakura pointed to the dark skin around her eyes, "are a result of that. When I told you the other day that I wasn't sleeping well, that's because I keep having nightmares about all of this. The bridge, our fight with Zabuza... and what Kurenai-sensei did before our mission."

Hinata winced. She had once asked Sakura once about how Team 7's training with Kurenai had gone, and she still regretted that question.

"You're right. Comparing myself to others can be silly, but... ugh, I can't believe I'm saying this," Sakura groaned in defeat. "I'm way weaker than Naruto now that he's got that fancy Shadow Clone Jutsu of his, and neither of us is even near Sasuke-kun's level."

Hinata carefully considered her friend's words before speaking her mind. Despite their last exchange, there was still a note of self-deprecation to Sakura's voice that irked her.

"I think... I think that as long as you work with "I have to become more useful" instead of "I have to stop being useless"... everything will work out fine, Sakura-san. You're smart and have excellent chakra control; I'm sure you'll become just as strong as them in time," she said, keeping her tone firm and positive, with a smile to complete the package.

"You... you really think so?"

"I know so! But... um..." Hinata began to play with her fingers. "Have you... considered accepting Kurenai-sensei's offer?"

Sakura crossed her arms. "Going to a fancy therapist just because of a silly illusion seemed like too much for too little. I was getting better, so I thought she was just exaggerating when she said how trauma from genjutsu can be hard to recover from. But this last week really proved me wrong... so yeah." She then frowned. "I'll try to see it after I get my money three days from now; I'm not sure our health care covers that kind of thing. It sounds expensive!"

"Well... I guess." Hinata thought her friend's concern was completely stupid given the kinds of surgeries that their health care covered, but kept that to herself. _'She is scared, after all.'_

"But that doesn't matter right now!" Sakura continued, suddenly jumping out of her seat. The pinkette's bright green eyes were sparkling as she faced Hinata, and if not for the Hyuuga being startled by her friend's sudden movement, she would've been smiling at the sight.

"I was hoping to spend my time lazing around, hanging with my parents and such... I mean, it _is_ supposed to be our free time, right? But no... I'll be focusing hard on training these next few days! After all," she smirked, "I gotta work that cake out of my system somehow! Oh, but I'm gonna grab another slice first. You up for round four?"

"Um... n-no. But thank you!" Hinata replied awkwardly. Sakura shrugged and went back to the kitchen, bringing Hinata's used plate and cup with her.

Hinata, quite honestly, would be down for eating more than twice what she had already consumed. But she was just a guest. Three slices had already been too much... with witnesses around, anyway.

Sakura returned, and Hinata tried not to look at the plate the pinkette held or its contents. "So, watcha doing till we're back on duty? Training too?" she asked, shoving more cake inside her mouth.

Hinata almost slumped. "I... I don't know. I really don't know."

Sakura raised an eyebrow... and then it struck her. "Mh," she swallowed in a hurry. "Sorry, I forgot about it...! You have your fight with your sister, don't you?"

"Y-Yeah... I think it will be tomorrow. I'll only be sure when I get home"

The pair fell in silence. Sakura couldn't say she envied Hinata... her friend had a lot to lose in this fight, but winning meant everything bad that would've happened to her would instead happen to her sister. It was a horrible situation to be in, and Sakura had no idea how to support her friend.

What could she even _say_ in that situation? _'Man, clans are so messed up...'_

"Sakura-san," Hinata said, rising and glancing at the nearby clock by the wall. "Thank you for everything, but I think I should be going. It's getting late... I should get back before it gets dark."

Sakura glanced at the sky through the nearby glass door. "Yeah... you're right. Let's go, I'll show you out."

Hinata grabbed her backpack and the two left the room. The streets were significantly emptier by then, but as the pair descended the stairs from Sakura's house...

"Okay, that's the last time, then I'm leaving," they heard a man's voice, frustration seeping through his tone.

Right outside, they found a man ringing the doorbell of one of Sakura's neighbors. Between his uniform, big backpack and the various letters he held under one arm, it wasn't hard to figure out he was a postman.

"Nope. Nobody home _again_ ," he groaned.

"Oh, you won't find anyone home at this time, mister," Sakura decided to butt in. "The old lady that lives there works from 6 a.m to 8 p.m."

"Well, that explains why nobody ever answers the door... I've been trying to deliver this little baby here for the past three days," he showed a small yellow package to the girls, "but it's a special thing. I need the recipient's signature to drop this off."

"Well, you're out of luck. She lives alone and works on weekends."

"So I can't deliver it and nobody can drop by the post office to get it because it's closed between those two times," the postman said, mostly to himself. "Gah... great. What now...? "

"You could try delivering that to the Hokage Tower," Sakura suggested, pointing in the building's direction. "She works there."

"Oohhh... Nice idea! Thank you! Oh, and I assume you live here so," he fumbled with his small stack of letters before bringing a few envelopes. "Number 47; that's for you."

Sakura looked at her mail in disgust. "...Awesome, bills."

"That's the adult world for you, little kunoichi. Thanks again and see ya!" he called out, before moving on to the next house.

"Dad's gonna _love_ these," Sakura commented off-handedly while she examined what would probably consume a good share of her future income.

Meanwhile, Hinata was doing a quick bit of math and the results scared her. "What kind of person works almost a hundred hours per week...?! T-That's dangerous, isn't? Especially for an older person!"

"Well, yeah," Sakura agreed. Both girls had heard stories about people dying from overworking before. "But that's what you get when you're the Hokage's secretary. Not that Hokage-sama is a young man anymore, either," Sakura kept rambling. "I dunno how they can do it!"

"Wait... _that_ old lady is your neighbor?!"

Sakura laughed a bit, finding Hinata's shock amusing. "Small world, isn't it?"

Mouth agape, Hinata's eyes shifted to the house. It wasn't a mansion or anything of the sort, but significantly bigger and fancier than what Hinata thought the secretary would require. For someone that was living alone and barely has any free time, she definitely wouldn't need more than a small, cheap apartment. Something practical above all else.

"You said she lives alone... this is crazy," she murmured. _'I don't understand...'_

"It is," Sakura said solemnly as she approached, also looking at her neighbor's home and drawing Hinata's attention. "About five years ago or so I got curious and asked my dad about it. You... you know what happened here in the village around thirteen years ago, right?"

Eyes widening, Hinata felt the blood draining from her face at the rhetorical question.

"Her family used to run a... a textile store, I think. Her husband, daughter and two of her sons worked there with her. Her other son was a ninja." Sakura lowered her head. "That son was one of those who died trying to fight the fox before the Fourth arrived, and her store... was obliterated by one of the energy blasts, with the rest of her family inside. The only reason she didn't die with them was because she had been bedridden that day with a cold."

"..."

"I suppose the village recovered," Sakura continued in a low voice. "But buildings can be rebuilt. People... not so much. That kind of stuff doesn't heal."

It was easy to see now, Hinata realized. It was just a small glimpse at someone else's life, but...

"Hey," she felt Sakura's hand on her shoulder, interrupting her thoughts. "Don't think too deeply about it. I know; it's sad, but... we can't do anything about it. And we have our own lives to live, too."

"I... you're right," Hinata sighed, shaking her head. She had enough on her plate as it was, and as much as she wanted to stall or run away... "I suppose I should go now, Sakura-san."

Sakura frowned at her.

"Um...?"

"Before you go..."

Hinata blinked. Her thought process faltered, awaiting Sakura's next words... and the next she knew, there was a huge mass of pink almost in her face, the warmth of another human pressing tightly against her, and a pair of arms snaked around her upper back.

 _'She's hugging me...!'_ Hinata's brain supplied unhelpfully as it ordered her body to freeze, stiffly.

"I know things will get rough for you in the next few days, but... hang in there," Sakura said softly on her ear, apparently not minding that Hinata didn't return the hug. "If you need me for anything, even if it's just to vent, I don't care. But you can count on me, okay?"

Awkwardly, the shy girl tried to rectify that mistake. It's not like she hadn't hugged someone or was hugged before—actually, far from it—just never from someone around her age. Nonetheless, she appreciated her friend's intentions _way_ too much to leave that action without a reaction to match it.

"Thank you, Sakura-san. I promise, I'll keep that in mind!"

Hinata spoke those words with a smile, but when they untangled themselves from each other, she found that her friend didn't exactly mirror that.

"Drop it."

"...E-Excuse me?"

The pinkette crossed her arms, but smiled playfully. "I think we have gone through enough these past weeks that calling me "Sakura-san" is almost insulting by now. It's way too formal for me, so if you don't want to call me "Sakura-chan", then please drop it."

"Um... okay." A moment of hesitation. "Then, thank you... Sakura."

It was so unfamiliar— _weird—_ saying someone's name with nothing attached to it. But when her friend beamed in response to the lack of the "offending" honorific as they waved goodbye to each other, Hinata decided it was something she could get used to.

* * *

Precisely two minutes after separating from Hinata, Sakura left her backpack on the edge of her bed before throwing herself on the mattress, making the backpack bounce. The only thing stopping Sakura from sighing wistfully was the last piece of her slice of chocolate cake, which she was still chewing on.

It was such an obvious fact that it barely counted as a realization, but Sakura only truly noticed it after she got back home.

 _'Hinata is my best friend right now.'_

Sakura couldn't deny it, she was quite fond of her newest friend. They had bonded a fair bit over personal struggles, training and semi-romantic drama... and it was only natural that she'd find new friends, as she lost all contact with her other friends from the academy (seeing as none of them managed to impress their would-be jonin-sensei).

But Hinata... it felt like shoving a key in a lock where it could fit, but not open. Close, but not quite.

And as her hand found itself drifting to the metallic plate of her "headband"... Sakura knew exactly why she felt that way.

* * *

It only would take a couple minutes for someone to reach the Hyuuga Compound from Sakura's house, but instead of maneuvering her way through main streets and being caught in the influx of people going back to their homes, Hinata took a longer path, which cut through a nearby park.

The birds and insects were audibly present, but outside of them it was just empty and quiet enough that Hinata allowed her mind to wander as she followed the familiar path.

At first, it felt good. Hinata had cowardly opted out of the whole "girl friends" thing back at the academy, so her experiences with Sakura were all new and exciting and made her warm on the inside. But those thoughts didn't last forever, and the small exchange that preceded their last "bonding" moment eventually was in the forefront of Hinata's mind, vanquishing her blissful mood.

Hinata knew that her opinion of the village as a whole was at all-time low. As far as she could remember, it never had been that great since she had always been put-off by how Naruto was treated inside Konoha's walls. Discovering that the reason behind it was ultimately a result of prejudice had stained it even more... and seeing one such event first-hand had shattered it all almost to the breaking point.

She didn't want to fight for those people. They didn't deserve it.

"And... I am not much better than then, in the end," she found herself saying, despite nobody being nearby to hear her shames.

Hinata knew those people were _wrong._ Even if they had kept their thoughts to themselves and treated Naruto like a normal person, they were being unfair to him. Not giving him a chance to prove himself and labeling him as something he wasn't. Judging him, for something he had no control over, and that ultimately had never impacted his life until very recently.

Some ignored him. Some feared him. Some hated him. They isolated him, not caring that Naruto was an orphan. Not caring that he was a human being and didn't have anyone to care for him, to protect him... or to love him. Calling him a monster while doing monstrosities themselves.

The number of people who actually went out of their way and tried to understand him amounted to less than a dozen.

The others? Even as her mind tried to lead her to a different path, Hinata's heart still didn't want anything to do with these people.

They weren't worth it.

And then, unknowingly, Sakura showed her the truth.

 _"But buildings can be rebuilt. People... not so much. That kind of stuff doesn't heal."_

She could've hidden behind the excuse that she had less than 24 hours to deal with so much information and feelings... it didn't change the fact that, in the end, she was judging all of these people without giving them the consideration they deserved—she was denying them a chance to be understood.

What they did to Naruto was wrong, she knew. And in some specific cases, even horrible. But they were human beings. Everyone is vulnerable to their own emotions getting the better of them. Hinata knew why they mistreated Naruto, or in the best cases ignored his plight. Now, however... she could see that was only the most superficial layer.

The malignant aura she felt back on the bridge was, undoubtedly, only but a small fraction of what the strongest of the bijuu would be capable of radiating. Being exposed to that, alone, would've left any normal person at the very least apprehensive around Naruto. That wasn't where it ended for many of the villagers, however.

The Kyuubi's attack on the village was considered a tragedy for a _reason._ Hinata didn't have any numbers... nobody spoke much about it. But she knew many people died on that day.

Still, some emerged from the incident unscathed. But after hearing what Sakura knew about Hiruzen's secretary, who showed so much enmity towards Naruto... Hinata finally realized that there were people who lost _everything_ that night, all in a single blow.

Even if the only one that was to blame for all of it was the fox... some people were in so much pain, trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, that it was no wonder that their hate would turn towards something. Naruto, the one who merely carried the demon, was the living reminder of everything that transpired that night.

It certainly wasn't logical, but the heart doesn't need logic. If Hinata had to guess, there were people in Konoha that looked at Naruto but didn't see that he was blond, that his eyes were a vibrant shade of blue, that his skin was a tan uncommon in Konoha. They didn't see his bright personality, they didn't see a frightened child on the verge of tears, or a prankster defiantly lashing out at the world, or a person that loved his village enough to risk his life to protect it.

As absurd as the notion might be, they didn't even see the orange.

They look at Naruto with eyes blinded by pain and fear and see only the whisker-shaped birthmarks on his cheeks.

They see a fox. A monster. A demon.

A murderer.

A convenient target for all of their pain, sorrow, anger and hate.

The realization that she had been walking an eerily similar path throughout the day hit Hinata like a bucket of icy water, dousing the flames that Naruto had unknowingly ignited inside her heart when he shared his story with her. And once the resulting steam dispersed... she realized one detail, that somehow, had always eluded her.

 _'Naruto-kun's goal has always been to grow strong enough to be Hokage, to earn the village's respect. But power alone won't make these people change their minds. If anything... they will begin to fear him even more if he becomes that powerful.'_

She sighed. The gate that separated the park from the district that surrounded the Hyuuga Compound was now in her sights. _'Am I being too pessimistic?'_

As much as she believed in Naruto's dream, she did _not_ believe he'd achieve it until his late twenties at the earliest. Their generation wasn't aware of Naruto's burden—they were only influenced by their parents. Theoretically, the next generation wouldn't have reason to deny him unless maybe Hiruzen's law was revoked somewhere along the line.

 _'But it still is a problem... I'm sure not all of the people who have a problem with Naruto-kun are civilians.'_

If even a portion of the Leaf's military was against Naruto, there would always be the risk of his coronation sparking a civil war somewhere down the line. That was not something Konoha could ever afford—a coup maybe, but not a drawn-out conflict. Hinata had paid attention to the history lessons back at the academy. Unless they somehow managed to "befriend" their major enemies, the Cloud and Stone villages would undoubtedly team up to take them down. And even if they got past old international grudges, that wasn't much of a guarantee for the village's safety.

Hinata still wondered if maybe she was overthinking it all... but she had come to a decision.

 _'I don't know how... or when,'_ she admitted to herself, _'but I must do what I can for the village to change their perception of Naruto-kun. I can't ignore them... I can't give up on my own village like this!'_

Losing faith on the people she swore to protect... that would only lead to disaster. Hinata was glad that she managed to see that before taking more than a couple steps down that path.

She was still angry at the village, of course. But she couldn't hope to support Naruto—to pay the lifelong debt she owned him—while traveling through an opposite path. Perhaps if she had continued, in a distant future, she'd be trying to convince Naruto to give up and leave it all behind. Or to take the hat by force. Or even... in the darkest of scenarios, to destroy the village, because they weren't worth it.

Again, perhaps her mind was just running _too_ wildly for her own good... but the thought made ice travel down her spine.

"No... I need to stop thinking about this," she said out loud as she realized how close to home she was now. _'I have my own problems to deal with right now. I shouldn't be worrying about someone else's at a time like this. Even... if it was a good distraction.'_

She had finally exited the park and right ahead, Hinata could faintly see the last gate she'd be going through on that day. It was decorated with a red flame that matched the designs embroidered on her jacket's shoulders: the entrance to the Hyuuga compound. And farther back, looming over the smaller houses that surrounded it... was her home, the clan head's manor.

She had run out of time... but she was not going to run away.

* * *

Hinata's first stop was her room. After leaving her backpack on her bed and a quick trip to the bathroom (mostly to erase all evidence of Sakura's chocolate cake from her teeth and fix her hair and clothes bit), the current Hyuuga heiress deemed herself presentable and made her way to Hiashi's office.

When the moment came enter, however, her legs froze in front of the door to clan head's office, one hand closed, ready to knock... and the other holding a white folder.

Unbeknownst to the girl, someone was watching her.

She hadn't been trying to be loud, but Hinata's footsteps were nowhere silent enough to escape the hearing of an experienced jonin working in silence. Though he had been busy with the day's last bits of paperwork, when Hiashi heard someone approaching and stopping near his door without announcing themselves, his Byakugan instinctively activated.

Though he knew he barely had the right to call himself that, Hiashi was still a father. In the privacy of his office, he allowed himself a relieved smile upon seeing his daughter had returned from her first real mission, alive, whole and well.

The moment was gone when he noticed her usual hesitation when it came to him. Eyebrows knitting together, he decided to call her directly to speed things up... but then he saw his daughter's features changing. Gone were any traces of that hesitation, replaced by something he had yet to see in his daughter's face.

Determination.

At the sound of three soft knocks on his door, the veins on surrounding Hiashi's pure-white eyes receded.

"You may enter."

The door slid open.

"Otou-sama." Hinata entered and bowed respectfully.

Her features had softened to something more neutral once she entered, but Hinata wasn't cowering from him.

Hiashi nodded in acknowledgment, his expression betraying nothing. "You're back, Hinata. How was your first C-rank mission?"

Hinata took it as a cue to sit on one of the vacant chairs in front of Hiashi's desk, across from him. "It... wasn't."

One of Hiashi's eyebrows went up. "Explain."

"...Our mission changed rank. From C to S."

As used to masking his emotions as he was, not even Hiashi Hyuuga could stop himself from displaying shock so openly at that.

He could, however, recover in less than a second. "Then I presume that this folder you're carrying isn't the mission report Hokage-sama promised me, correct?"

A tiny nod.

"Tell me everything."

Hinata needed more than a few minutes to carry out that order, especially since she knew her father would be expecting her to give him more details about her battles and individual contributions during the whole mission, as he had forewarned her on the first day she came home with a headband on her neck.

Hinata would've never been able to guess from her father's stoic reaction to her words, but the Hyuuga clan head was in a fair bit of emotional turmoil under his icy mask.

Aimed at all adults involved, there was a mixture of anger and disgust. From the two jonin-sensei who decided to continue an at-the-time A-rank mission with six green genin in tow, to the lying client, the scumbag Gatou and even the Hokage, who had been warned about the danger but didn't overrule their choice.

Between Kakashi's experience and Kurenai's personality, he couldn't believe they made the decision to continue. Yes, the genin teams had the means to detect threats and avoid them without too much hassle, but as Zabuza proved, no plan survives contact with the enemy—it was too much risk. He was particularly disappointed with Kurenai in this regard.

And aimed at his own daughter... was some disappointment too. Simple mathematics and logic told him that Hinata had pushed herself more than she should've during their travel to Wave, even though she hadn't said it outright. He knew the Byakugan's limits intimately and hoped that was a lesson his daughter would not forget anytime soon.

But far more than disappointment, there was something else _._ For once, he could say Hinata went well and beyond his expectations. Her contributions as a tracker and fighter during the group's first battle were satisfactory, but neither were particularly special. What had caught his attention, though, was her decision-making during the next two conflicts.

The way she surprised Zabuza and the idea of weaponizing basic Earth constructs both spoke of a cleverness he hadn't know she had, and the fact she survived fights with people above her skill level and that fought with mid-range weapons—even managing to get the upper hand for in one for a moment—suggested that she had become stronger than he had predicted.

However, Hinata's fatal flaw was a lack of self-confidence, which lead to doubts and hesitation that have no place in the field. While she had yet to overcome that... seeing slight changes in her behavior as she stood before him were raw evidence that she had made considerable progress during her time away from home. He couldn't claim that she was confident, as she had briefly shown before knocking on his door, but she was finally taking the steps down that road.

During her report, he noticed she had stuttered far less, to the point she pronounced many sentences close to perfectly, and some even without any noticeable hesitant pauses. She tried to hold eye contact rather than keep her head lowered with her gaze to the floor, even if she couldn't hold it for long. Her body language and the volume of her voice reeked of fear before, but now they only hinted at it as they approached a level of neutrality.

Hiashi couldn't deny it. Seeing his daughter growing up had made him _proud._

It took much of his self-control to hold back a smile, and to not say those words out loud. He wanted to give his daughter the acknowledgment she sought and fought for... but that opportunity had long since passed, he knew.

There was only one remaining emotion to be addressed, and it was the one he chose to focus on as Hinata ended her report.

"I... wasn't able to contribute significantly after Kurenai-sensei r-rescued me. W-What happened next, I think... I think the mission report will be able to explain better than me, otou-sama," she finished.

Obviously, Hinata hadn't told him everything. She hadn't been sure if discussing Naruto's secret was wise—nor she wanted to talk about that at the moment—and Hiashi _definitively_ would not be interested in all the teenage interpersonal drama that went on during the mission... but two details she had left out brought about the last unmentioned emotion in Hiashi: confusion.

"Given the mist that had been there, I understand you cannot give me enough details on the other fights. However," he crossed his arms, "there are two things you failed to explain about your last fight. Namely... I do not understand how you could've tripped your opponent in the bridge under those circumstances, nor why your final strike to her chest failed to incapacitate her."

Whatever progress Hinata had made in forging a better mask to wear, Hiashi could see it start to crack.

"...T-This," she gulped, before offering the white folder she held, "this is a r-report on... everyone's training. T-The Hokage's project, I mean."

Hiashi grabbed it, noticing how some of it was crumpled, no doubt victims of Hinata's nervousness. His subsequent flat stare carried both curiosity and an unspoken order.

"I... um, this sh-should give you the answer you want..."

Hiashi raised an eyebrow, but retrieved the document from within and began to read it.

 _'Let's see... this first part is about her sensei's genjutsu lessons.'_

Hinata was learning illusions of the lowest level, but was having a little bit of trouble. Outside of discovering that the otherwise unremarkable civilian girl had more potential with genjutsu than even the Uchiha prodigy, there wasn't much else of note in that part of the report.

He then moved on to Kakashi's report, which was oddly divided in three.

 _'...What arrogance,'_ he openly scowled after finishing that part. _'Instead of teaching them about ninjutsu as he was meant to, he gave them a true genin test?'_

The words "And thus I conclude that Team 8 is fit for active duty" in particular stood out to him in Kakashi's report, leaving him to scowl at the paper. They weren't his genin, and he had no say on whether or not they were fit to exercise their profession. He noticed a reference to the mysterious fainting episode Hinata had mentioned to him—she had been far too dirty to get away without being forced to explain herself.

The second one wasn't much better. The only reason he wasn't angrier at Kakashi for focusing on something as complex as elemental manipulation instead of something with more immediate gains, was because that had saved his daughter's life in the end.

Then, finally, he saw what Hinata had alluded to.

Eyes widening further each time, he read and reread the last section at least four times before daring to open his mouth.

He _finally_ understood why Hinata had fainted and ended up in the hospital the day before her mission.

"...This must be a mistake," he ultimately concluded, gaze falling to his daughter once again in a silent demand.

Hinata didn't trust her voice enough to reply to that. But luckily, there was a long, thin glass of water on her father's desk. Leaning forward, she grabbed the cup and brought it closer to her. She allowed her hand to hover above the cup for a few moments, and then lifted her arm.

The water followed in the exact shape the cup had molded it into. Not one drop fell from the mass of liquid as Hinata moved it around in various directions, before returning the water to the cup.

Hiashi watched it all with eyes wide open. If Hinata's affinity hadn't been Water, she'd have never reached this level of mastery over the element in only a couple weeks of training. His unbelieving stare then turned to Hinata, who took a deep breath to try and keep her nerves in check as she went to answer his question in full.

"I... a-after I was knocked down, my opponent walked towards me. I heard when she stepped in a puddle and I... just moved. I reached for the water and p-pulled... she tripped, and I attacked."

Hiashi listened in silence, still visibly rattled. Hinata didn't know how much of his attention she still held, but continued.

"At the time, I didn't know it hadn't worked... b-but, um, I think it was because I tried to do a Gentle Fist strike immediately after m-manipulating the Water. I... I think that changed the properties... of the attack, I mean."

Hinata wasn't sure if her strike had more accidentally used her Water chakra instead of Lightning, somehow, or if her body had tried to change it and couldn't do it fast enough to pump anything to begin with, but those were the only answers her brain had arrived at after days of thought over the matter. Her only certainty was that Haru's icy armor had been broken where she had landed her strike, thanks to Kiba and the Earth daggers.

Hiashi leaned over his desk with but a hand on his forehead to support his weight. His gaze was unfocused as he tried to process what he had just witnessed.

"..."

"..."

"..."

"..."

Silence reigned over the room for far more than Hinata was comfortable with, and the sound of her own heartbeat ringing in her ears was becoming more frantic by the second.

"This... this _must_ be a mistake," Hiashi repeated himself, standing upright in his chair and facing the girl seated across him once again. "Hinata, this shouldn't be _possible_. Our clan is one of the oldest in history, and it didn't take long for our ancestors to notice that the Byakugan almost never awakens in a child if one of the parents doesn't have it. It's for this very reason the clan was strictly against its members forming families with outsiders until just a few decades after we joined the Hidden Leaf Village and managed to attain some form of stability."

Hinata nodded timidly. She hadn't known about that last part, but it made sense in hindsight. A nomadic clan that depended on missions and was in constant conflict with rivals couldn't afford having clansmen who couldn't keep up with their peers.

They couldn't afford "failures", she realized with a frown.

"This limited the genetic pool of our clan, however," Hiashi continued. "Despite our clan's age, our Gentle Fist is nowhere as old. By the time we created the style, we had limited ourselves so much that every person in the clan had the same affinity: Lightning. It is impossible for a child to inherit another affinity if both parents have it; much like our Byakugan, it is a recessive genetic trait. And much like the Byakugan, this is a trait both your mother and I share. A trait you _have_ to possess."

 _'If you were my daughter,'_ Hinata's mind completed for her in her father's voice, head hung low. _'I suppose I was lucky that, somehow, at least my Byakugan managed to awaken...'_

But despite the shame and fear she felt, despite being so scared of Hiashi's gaze... Hinata refused to let go of the resolve she had found after confronting Naruto.

Hinata closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and raised her head again.

"What is going to happen now? T-To me and... Hanabi?"

Hiashi grimaced. _'That godforsaken duel...'_

He crossed his arms. "I... cannot answer that question as of now."

Hinata blinked. _'He can't? But why?!'_

It was such a simple matter, from her perspective. Now that they both were aware that she was _not_ his daughter, she couldn't possibly be the heiress. The only matter left to decide is if he'd give the title to Hanabi here and now, or order her to either forfeit or throw the match.

 _'Well, there is the issue of what would happen to me after that. Maybe that's why,'_ she thought, as apathetically as she could force herself to.

"...It is becoming late, Hinata," Hiashi said dismissively, rising from his chair. "You should get ready for dinner."

The girl glanced at the clock. It was almost 7 pm, which was when her family had dinner.

And yet, she saw her father walk towards a nearby bookshelf; he quickly pulled two tomes and seemed to be searching for a third. She noted that the report about her training was still on his desk.

"I realize tomorrow is your day off, but please stay within the compound's grounds. And inform your grandfather that he can begin dinner without me; I won't be joining you tonight," he said, confirming her suspicions.

Had their relationship been better, Hinata would have tried to steer him away from overworking himself, but as it was... she could only obey and leave.

* * *

The Hyuuga clan had an extremely old tradition of greeting the sun together, as a family... which merely meant that the entire clan reunited each morning to have breakfast together. The tradition was older than the Caged Bird Seal, which split the clan.

Only the Main house upheld the tradition. Every morning, a fancy, big breakfast was served to all Main house Hyuuga that felt like joining their clan head for breakfast, which usually meant a good 99% of the Main house present in the village.

It was free food after all.

Not participating was considered a grave social faux-pax and a sure-fire way to build up infamy within the clan if you didn't have a good reason to skip, such as illness. Not that Hinata cared; at least, not anymore.

Being around so many people always had put her a little on the edge, and as news of her blunders and her sister's talent began to spread, Hinata had decided to wake up earlier than usual both to avoid the embarrassing gatherings and to begin her training regimen earlier than usual. It was a convenient excuse and the only reason Hiashi allowed her to do it in the first place, even if she thought he just wanted to escape the embarrassment from having her nearby.

The other meals of the day, however, had nothing special tied to them. Lunch and dinner were private affairs: each individual family of the clan had those meals in their own houses on normal days. Sometimes, her duties as a student and then as a ninja allowed Hinata to have lunch away from the compound... but she almost never could skip dinner.

While breakfast was far too chaotic for her tastes, dinner was the exact opposite. Her father and grandfather usually kept a quiet conversation going, between politics and clan events. Hinata and Hanabi, however, ate in silence. If neither of the adults directed a word to them, the girls were to remain silent.

It was horribly stifling and she _hated_ it. Especially when her father didn't eat with them. It brought unpleasant memories of the first years following her mother's death, but regardless of how she felt, she went inside the clan head's private dining room.

It had fancy, traditional décor, and the table was big enough to accommodate her family plus a few important guests that occasionally joined them. There were no guests that day, and when Hinata entered, she only saw her grandfather and Hanabi, both already seated and waiting.

"Ojii-sama," she bowed to her grandfather. "Hanabi-chan."

Her grandfather, Hiroshi Hyuuga, looked, for lack of better terms, literally like her father but with gray hair and wrinkles—oddly, his clothes were also faded echoes of Hiashi's garments. Hinata didn't know him very well; he was extremely distant and usually too occupied with his current duties in the council. She understood why he wouldn't bother giving her any attention, but not even her sister earned that from him despite her talent. Still, he at least acknowledged Hinata's entrance and greeting with a simple nod.

Hanabi Hyuuga, too, eerily resembled Hiashi, although with softer features between age and a little of her mother's influence. Her hair was the strongest trait she shared with her father: long and dark brown. The seven years old girl was still clad in her simple training clothes and kept her pure-white eyes glued to Hinata as she took a seat, watching with an expression of contained surprise.

Hiroshi broke their brief silence.

"Hinata, I see you have returned from your mission. I trust you brought honor to our clan?"

She stopped to think.

It was an odd feeling, but... her mistakes she did not outweigh her contributions to the successful mission, this time.

"I... I did, ojii-sama."

"Hmm... good," he said, failing to spot any hints of deceit. "I am sure your father has said something to this effect already, but remember that from now own you represent our clan to the world outside Konoha. Always keep this in mind."

"...I will," she nodded, rigidly. Her eyes met Hanabi's for one moment while their grandfather took a sip from a nearby cup—saké, if Hinata had to bet.

Once he had finished, she informed him of Hiashi's decision to skip dinner.

"Hmm... I see." Hiroshi snapped his fingers, the loud noise summoning a Branch house servant from the kitchen. "My son won't be joining us tonight. Serve dinner immediately," he ordered to the young maid that answered the call.

"Yes, Hiroshi-sama."

The girl—perhaps only a few years older than Hinata—bowed stoically in a way that matched her detached tone and turned to return to the kitchen, but Hinata drew her attention with a small hand gesture before she could go too far.

"Ah." The maid smiled warmly as she approached and, again, her voice matched that. "How can I help you, Hinata-sama?"

"I'm not feeling very hungry tonight... can you make sure my plate doesn't have as much food as usual, please?" Hinata asked, mirroring the older girl's expression.

"Of course!" the maid replied with enthusiasm.

A snap-like noise rung out again, this time from Hanabi.

"I want grape juice," the little girl ordered bluntly.

The maid's lips formed a thin line. "Of course, Hanabi-sama," she said in the same flat tone she had used with Hiroshi, bowed, and finally left.

Soon, dinner was served. They ate the meal in a stagnant silence.

As her portion had been quite small, Hinata finished only in a few minutes and quickly excused herself after being granted permission to leave.

A pair of eyes followed her every movement...

* * *

As the moon rose higher and higher over the village's starry sky, a wide-awake Hinata found herself with few options to pass the time until sleep came.

She had a strategy that always worked for these nights: a hot bath, followed by reading a good book in the comfort of her bed and its warm blanket and fluffy pillow. The words would eventually begin to blur together, and that's when the girl knew it was time to turn the lights off. She had been doing that almost every night for quite a few years... but she could tell that wouldn't cut it that night, and not because the brand new romance novel she held was and too gripping or unbearably bad.

"Why am I even bothering?" she grumbled to herself, closing the book without even placing a bookmark as sigh charged with frustration escaped her. Reluctantly crawling out of her blanket, Hinata left the novel on the dresser by the foot of her bed and collapsed on the mattress once again, free to stare emptily at the ceiling.

Despite the relaxing bath she had just taken, Hinata still felt very tense. Her late night reading ritual had been completely ruined, and she lacked the focus to enjoy the story in the first place.

Her mind just kept wandering against her will.

Part of it was her curiosity over how, exactly, she'd be losing her title of heiress... but what truly tormented Hinata then was the long-term consequence of her inevitable loss: an arranged marriage to bring power to the Hyuuga clan.

That prospect brought so many unknowns for the girl to ponder about. What kind of man would her future husband be? A young, future heir to some kind of business, or an old, experienced politician? Would they be nice to her or want to treat her like his property? Would her father wait for her to get older before looking for someone, or would the clan choose him immediately? Would she have to leave Konoha, her family, and friends... all because of her husband? Where would she live?

 _'...What is going to happen to me now?'_

None of the choices looked appealing to Hinata. But this was a burden, she knew, that she would have no choice but to bear... and she would do her best to endure it.

 _'It will all be worth it in the end. Because if I don't, then—'_

A noise broke Hinata out of her thoughts. Someone was knocking on her door, and quite impatiently judging from the minuscule intervals between each knock.

"Who is it?" she called as shifted positions, sitting on the bed.

"It's me, onee-sama!"

 _'Almost as if summoned,'_ Hinata remarked to herself with a tiny smile. "Come on in!"

It opened to reveal one Hanabi Hyuuga, clad in white pajamas... and most importantly, carrying a tray _full_ of cookies, and a cup of milk.

The young girl quickly stepped inside and closed the door with her free hand. "Hey! You barely ate anything tonight, so I thought you'd like a snack before bed!"

"How thoughtful of you." Somehow, Hinata's smile got even wider as she approached her sister. "I wonder why it looks like a bit too much just for me, though..." she remarked knowingly, taking the tray.

"Well, _duh,_ " Hanabi rolled her eyes. "It's for me too. Not that I doubt you can eat all of that by yourself."

Hinata ignored that last remark and left the tray on the dresser, just beside her newest romance novel and—

"Whoa!"

The moment the tray touched the dresser, was the moment Hinata's world twisted as she got tackled to the bed.

"I' missed you _so_ much!" Hanabi squealed, squeezing her sister's torso with the strongest hug her little 7-year-old body could muster.

Laughing, Hinata responded with a gentle, but firm hug of her own. "I missed you too, Hanabi-chan. I'm sorry we didn't have time to catch up... I had to talk with father, and then dinner—"

"Don't worry, it's fine," the younger girl replied softly and broke off the hug to sit on the mattress. "I know you'd be trying to sleep by now but just I couldn't wait till tomorrow to catch up! I've got so much to tell you!"

"Well, then let's hear it." Hinata reached for her glass of milk and sat as well. "How is the academy going?"

Hanabi's eyes sparkled, and so Hinata found her early woes dissolving between small talk and a sweet snack, but most importantly, good company. Someone she could act freely with, without worrying she would make things awkward, without worrying about not being enough, without worrying that her affection might not be welcome.

...Well, that last one? Sort of.

The two sisters usually acted distant with each other while the house was still busy, but when they found time to spend together and there were nobody else around, the masks fell. Hanabi had questioned this more than once and still didn't understand very well why Hinata insisted on keeping their "bonding sessions" private... but that the Hanabi didn't understand, to Hinata, was evidence that her plan was working.

Hinata's heart still held the scar from the day Hiashi had harshly scolded her for attempting to hug him, years ago, not long after her mother's death. He had argued that it was "showing weakness in public" but had refrained from showing anything resembling affection even in private ever since. Her desire for her father's love being completely denied when she had needed it the most... it was a bitter memory.

As the years passed and Hanabi got older, Hinata noticed that despite Hanabi not being a failure like herself, Hiashi also held her at an arm's length. Hinata didn't know how he would've reacted to the two of them spending their time together, but she did know she could not let her sister grow up in the same way she had.

It was her personal mission to help Hanabi grow up knowing the meaning of the word "love". Even if that came at the cost of jeopardizing her own fragile relationship with the clan and father, if her failures and "failures" could keep Hanabi in their good graces, it was a price worth paying for. Trying to redeem herself in her father's eyes would only brew amenity between herself and Hanabi, so giving up on that had not been a hard decision at all.

Of course, Hinata knew her sister would eventually mature and realize her schemes, but she'd cross that bridge when she came to it. Now that she'd be busier and busier with missions or training and that Hanabi just started going to the academy, she knew that whatever time they had to be together would have to be even more cherished than normal.

"...and there's also Iruka-sensei," Hanabi kept going, gesticulating wildly. "You were right 'bout him! He is kinda cranky and strict, yeah, but he's actually a big softy when you get on his good side. I like him way more now."

"You didn't believe me?" Hinata, still smiling, raised an eyebrow. "I studied under him for years! I'm glad you've warmed up to him. But... you didn't say anything about friends," she said, holding the smile to hide her worry.

The mask proved futile when Hanabi became crestfallen. "Everyone kinda avoids me, onee-sama. I'm not too sure why... I mean, I stopped gloating about winning every taijutsu duel for a while now! I don't know what I'm doing wrong..."

 _'Ah... some things never change, do they?'_ Hinata realized sullenly. Her clan's reputation and unnatural eyes made befriending a Hyuuga very intimidating for most. Others resorted to bullying, but Hinata knew her sister's fighting prowess kept that possibility at bay, at least.

"Just... no matter how rough it becomes, don't give up on trying, okay?" Hinata tried to comfort her, speaking from experience. "As long as you're nice to others, you'll see they will find out how sweet and cute you can be."

She got a pillow to the face for that comment.

"I'm _not_ cute!" Hanabi screeched, flushing and pouting in a way that completely betrayed her words.

It only made the elder sister giggle, to the younger's chagrin. "Sure, sure. But going back, nobody tried to befriend you?"

"Well..." she looked away.

"Well...?"

"There was one boy... and, um..."

The guilt in Hanabi's tone made Hinata's take a stricter edge, but without losing its gentleness. "Hanabi-chan, what did you do?"

The younger girl clutched the pillow tightly and frowned. "So there's this troublemaker in our class, the Hokage's grandson: Konowhatever. He's so loud and annoying! He's always acting like a clown in class and he tries to prank our teachers and even some of our classmates."

Hinata suddenly felt very, very sorry for Iruka, and very, very guilty for wanting to burst out laughing.

"I dunno what he was thinking, but he tried to talk to me... what, two days after you left? It was after he got busted trying to set up some sort of trap with a smoke bomb for one of the teachers. Said his closest friends were too scared to try pranking "big targets" again and he thought my Byakugan could help them to prank people without being caught."

...And then Hinata felt like strangling someone. _'Why didn't I think of that before?!'_

"I kinda snapped at him after that, hehe..." Hanabi finished, sheepishly. "We fought, then I said some rude things..."

"Like what?"

Hanabi told her, and Hinata gasped.

"Hanabi! Never say anything like that again! Did you apologize?"

Hanabi had cowered a bit at Hinata's intentional drop of the honorific, but the question sparked her fury.

"Onee-sama, he's always being stupid and causing a ruckus in class!" She bounced out of bed. Because of him a lot of our teachers can't finish their lessons and we get extra homework! He deserved it!"

The older girl sighed, halfway sympathetic. She had (almost) always found Naruto's pranks amusing, but it bothered her how sometimes _everyone_ in the class got punished in some way because of him.

"...And then?"

"And then each time we have to spar in class he challenges me," Hanabi smirked, full of smugness. "I, of course, always wipe the floor with him... but now he keeps trying to prank me! Sore loser...!"

"Trying?"

"Byakugan," Hanabi shrugged, before scowling.

 _'Oh, the irony.'_

"The first time he got me, though. I never expected that whoopie cushion on my chair. But then again," her eyes gleamed with mischief, "I bet he never expected that I'd "serve" it to back to him as lunch a minute later!"

"Hanabi-chan!" Hinata gasped. "You could've suffocated him!"

"He had it coming! And besides, he vomited right afterwards so no harm done, right?"

With a weary sigh, the older girl buried her face in her hands. _'They declared war on each other,'_ she realized. "Please tell me otou-sama didn't catch wind of this..."

Hanabi looked away. "...I still have two extra hours of training per day, until next week," the younger girl grumbled, clearly feeling wronged. "So that means just fifteen minutes of break time after I get back, until dinner. _Fifteen!_ "

Groaning, Hinata realized that nothing she could've said would convince her sibling of her fault in that fiasco if even their father apparently failed.

"But anyways, what about you?" Hanabi changed the subject. "You went to another country for your mission, right? Tell me more!"

"That's... a rather long story," Hinata said, glancing at her alarm clock. "Why don't we save that one for another time, Hanabi-chan? We'd be here until morning if I began now."

"Aww...!" Hanabi pouted, knowing _exactly_ what Hinata's weak spot was. "Come on, please?"

The older girl almost gave in to her sibling's adorable charm, but found an escape route when she remembered something else.

"Oh, but I bought you something while I was there!"

"A present?" Hanabi's face lit up like a firework, her namesake. "What is it?! _Where_ is it?!"

"Calm down," Hinata giggled as she got up and walked towards her backpack. After a few moments—and a mental note to hide a certain incriminating object that didn't belong to her before someone else could find it—she retrieved the present and offered it to her sister with a flourish.

"Ooooh! A book!" Hanabi snatched it and took in the bright golden letters on the deep blue cover. "Uh... "Tales of Waves"? What's it about? Pirates?"

"Well, maybe there's some. It's a collection of fairy tales, folklore and other such things from the Land of Waves. I was told they are pretty popular with kids of your age, there."

Hanabi was too distracted flipping through the pages to reply. "Wow, there's a lot of pretty pictures here, too... oh, a mermaid!"

"So, did you like—whoa!"

Sticking to the tried and true, Hanabi pounced on Hinata again and locked her into a tight embrace. No words were needed, but the small girl happily spoke her mind anyways.

"I love it! Thank you so much!"

Hinata closed her eyes and returned the hug with a fond smile. "I'm glad..."

The two sisters remained like that for a few moments, enjoying each other's warmth... until Hinata heard her sister yawning.

"Sounds like someone should be going to sleep," Hinata said with a hint of humor, breaking the hug.

"Onee-sama, it's just half past eight. Besides," she practically shoved her book on Hinata's face, "I wanna start reading!"

"Why don't you do it like me, then? Read it on your bed until you get too tired to continue."

"Um... well." Hanabi looked down, suddenly finding her shifting feet to be very interesting. "I was... hoping I could sleep with you tonight. Maybe we could read together?"

The answer came in a surprisingly frigid tone. "Aren't you too old for this kind of thing? You have your own room."

Hanabi was not expecting such a cold rebuke. Hurt, she somehow found the courage to look up to her usually kind elder sister... who winked at her.

Red spread through Hanabi's face. " _You...!_ "

Hinata was too busy giggling to resist when Hanabi shoved her on the bed again, which only made her laugh harder while the smaller girl fumed.

"Of course you can sleep with me, silly! Do you even have to ask?" she kept laughing as she got up. "Grab your things from your room, okay? I'm going to the bathroom—don't forget to brush your teeth again!"

Hanabi grumbled something under her breath, but Hinata saw her smile before she vanished.

 _'That girl...'_

Once Hinata left her bathroom, she saw Hanabi had already invaded her bed, which now had two pillows and an extra blanket (Hinata's greedy nature surfaced during the night, usually leaving Hanabi without any covers). The girl had not only nested herself on the side by the wall, but she had also turned off the room's lights and turned on the lamp by the dresser. The book was in her hands, but she had resisted the temptation and waited for Hinata.

"Come on!"

"Alright, alright," Hinata laughed, making herself comfortable under the covers. "Whose turn it is? I forgot."

Hanabi brought her fingers to her chin as she thought about it. The sisters had a little system where they'd take turns reading for one another, and Hanabi was pretty sure she had been the last one. "It's your turn, onee-sama."

She shoved the book on Hinata's lap. "Sure. Let's see what this first story is about..."

Hinata was surprised how easy it was to focus on reading this time around, even though she felt a little tired than before. What was no surprise to her, though, was seeing Hanabi barely keeping herself awake by the time she finished the first and seemingly only tale of the night, almost fifteen minutes later.

"I guess that's enough for tonight." Hinata closed the book.

"But onee-sama... just..."

A traitorous yawn escaped Hanabi's lips, killing any argument she might have come with.

"I think your body's trying to say something."

"Hrmm... okay. _Fine._ "

Suppressing a chuckle—Hanabi could never stay awake past nine—Hinata crawled out of bed to put Hanabi's book away and turn off the lights.

"Goodnight, Hanabi-chan," Hinata whispered once she was back.

"Night, onee-sama..."

Despite having her own plenty of room on her side of the bed, the sleepy girl decided to invade Hinata's space, nesting herself on her sister's shoulder.

If Hinata had any complaints, Hanabi's next words silenced them forever.

"Love you..."

The last thing Hanabi felt one that night was Hinata's lips briefly pressing against her forehead.

"Love you too."

Closing her pale lavender eyes, Hinata felt all the inner turmoil from earlier disappearing, burned away by a strong fire that Hanabi left burning inside her heart, with nothing but two simple words.

That fire fueled Hinata's resolve to continue pressing forward.

It reminded her of what was truly important. Of why she absolutely _had_ to endure whatever fate decided to throw in her way.

 _'I'm doing this for you, Hanabi-chan. I don't know what will happen... but I know that it will happen just to me, and you'll still have a future ahead of you. You're smart, strong... you'll grow to be a warrior and a leader that everyone will be proud of. And even if you don't want that life, you'll have the chance to pursue your own path, at least.'_

As long as she could ensure Hanabi's happiness, to Hinata, that was enough. It didn't matter what she'd need to sacrifice. It was worth it.

Because, above all else, there was nobody in the world Hinata loved more than her adorable little sister.

* * *

A/N:

Well... I hope this chapter was to your enjoyment!

Between what knowing the truth about the Kyuubi AND witnessing Naruto getting shunned while she understood the context, I thought Hinata would be quite mad afterwards. But most importantly, she needed to manage those feelings, which is why the scene with Sakura and the next existed (beyond exploring their friendship and a bit of off-screen SasuSaku).

Curse you, _Perentie Fan,_ for giving me this idea to work with! I... enjoyed it, and I think if not for your review, I wouldn't have realized that exploring the impact these events had on Hinata needed to be explored more, lest she become jaded. Playing with fanon tropes like the "all civilians are the devil" is always nice, too. So thanks, _Perentie Fan!_

And on the topic of thanking my reviewers, _Ace McKnight_ now not only is joining _gio08_ in the hall of fame (AKA: they reviewed every chapter, bringing my review count above 300!), they were also kind enough to steer me away from shaming my biology teacher by mixing up recessive genes with dominant genes when the topic of affinity+genetics was first brought up. I didn't mix it up in the chapter, but in my mind, which would have impacted the plot point here. (one effing year later. I should commit sudoku at some point...)

This wasn't important to the plot, but Lightning being recessive would mean it should've been one of the rarer outcomes genetically speaking, as it is usually only possible if both parents carry the recessive trait. The explanation I have for this is that the ninja world accounts for what is more common between clans, and then the bigger villages they formed. That's where you'd have lots of people with known affinities... so, this disregards MILLIONS of civilians who never had their chakra tested. They don't have enough for ninja-wizardry, but they do have affinities. Add them to the pool, and perhaps the definition of what is common and rare could be different...

That, and it is possible to have a population where the most common genetic trait is the rarest, like how in some parts of our world the O blood type is the most common. Consider how clans kept to themselves, especially people with a recessive dojutsu like the Hyuuga... and this is a possible outcome. There are other ways this could happen, too.

With that out of the way, non-guest reviewers, you're free to move to the next chapter once it's out! Shouldn't take more than a couple days. Just, please... drop a review if you can! I'm not a girl and don't have siblings, so I'm really curious as to how good and believable some of the scenes were, and there's also the debut of Hinata's "sister mode"!

It would really make my day if you reviewed this! Just... I apologize, if you review before the next chapter comes out, as I might not reply until then. But I will!

Guest Review Answers:

Guest (C18): Your comments about Hinata makes me wonder why you are reading this fic in the first place. They seem to imply you don't like her or at least my interpretation of her, so why waste your time reading this? Considering how much I spoke about it in the chapter, I won't bother with the Team 7 comment. Feel free to believe whatever you want. I already addressed the point of why Sakura's crush in the academy days was superficial and Hinata's wasn't in another guest review answer, C14's. It has nothing to do with the romantic feeling, but _everything_ else. Mainly, Hinata wanted a friend more than she wanted a boyfriend. She wanted to know Naruto himself, instead of being fixated on aspects like cool/strong/smart/handsome like Sakura had been-note her perspective on Sasuke in this chapter.

You could also just drop the fic.


	20. Chapter 20 - Guiding Light (Star)

For anyone that might have missed this, I split the second intermission chapter, which was already a split chapter... into one more part. So if you last read stuff about Naruto, there's a chapter 19 waiting for you with the rest of that day through Hinata's eyes in a page that is not this one. Apologies for that!

And I would apologize for the delay too, but 95% of it was just my beta going MIA and sending the files back at an inopportune time. I feel bad you guys had to wait, but it was out of my hands. I was just as anxious as some of you.

Anyways, this entire second day was another reason for the second split. There's one big scene, one giant scene, and a micro scene at the end. Many sections of the first two were just me trying to keep up with the characters—they did their own thing, I was just recording it. Such an odd feeling...

This chapter is also very heavy. Or at least, that was my intention. Hopefully you guys have the heart to enjoy this!

* * *

 _Intermission_

Chapter 20: Guiding Light (Star) [Current Version: 1.0]

* * *

Though Hinata's home had a dojo, she had always liked to practice outdoors better. Luckily for her, they had a yard for such purposes, and Hinata settled for a small corner near the entrance to her mother's garden where she could train in peace.

She was sitting on the ground with an array of bowls spread in front of her. Two small bowls that she was transferring water to and from, and a bigger bowl that held the other two and any water lost in the process.

In the air, hovering above the bowls, was a mass of water that appeared to be having a convulsion.

"Come on. Come _on_...!"

Her pleas went by ignored. A splash resounded through the area once again, and Hinata watched helplessly as the two liters water she had been wrestling to control fell a few inches away from the targeted bowl.

Despite her shoulders sagging with a brief sigh, Hinata didn't mind that failure much. She knew how much water she was capable of flawlessly manipulating, and it was not two liters—that would've meant she had completed her training. But she tried from time to time to move all the water from one small bowl to the other to see how far she had come. She had barely progressed since her day of training began two hours prior... but still, progress was progress, and Kakashi had made it very clear that this was the norm.

After manually pouring water back into the correct bowl and placing her hand about an inch above the water, Hinata tried again. Her chakra seeped into the water, mingling with it as she commanded. That was the easy part, and Hinata stopped the flow of her chakra once she had a connection with roughly 80% of the liquid—her current limit.

She raised her arm and so did the water. The mass kept the shape from the bowl as best as it could, but Hinata's control was still imperfect. Almost as if the water had been solid ice that was quickly melting, parts of the liquid fell back into the bowl in scattered drips across its "bottom".

Her arm then moved to the left, leaving a bit of water to drip into the big bowl until the mass was hovering above a second smaller, empty bowl. Slowly as to not make a huge mess, Hinata broke her control over the water and allowed it to fall gently.

It was tedious and repetitive work. The idea and sensation of being able to move the liquid as she willed it had become novel long ago, but she had to persist even as her other hand hurried to cover a stray yawn.

 _'Maybe Hanabi-chan had been right,'_ she thought, remembering her younger sister's tantrum over the alarm clock waking them up at five in the morning, ending with her calling Hinata crazy before rolling closer to the wall and hiding under both of their blankets. Though Hinata had ignored her then... as the hours flew by, she realized that maybe the little girl had a point.

 _'After all, yesterday was a very draining day and—'_

"If you keep training under the sunlight, the water will begin to evaporate and your results will be compromised."

Gasping, Hinata whirled around and almost knocked over her training equipment.

Her eyes landed on a figure who was standing a few meters behind her, leaning against the door that led back into the manor. Their clothes were a simple tan shirt and khaki shorts, comfortable and practical for a warrior; they failed to hide the bandages covering both of their right limbs. One might have mistaken the person for a girl around Hinata's age, thanks to their long brown hair, tied in a small ponytail near the end, but the voice belonged to a male.

His face, framed by the straps of a thin headband hidden behind his forehead protector, showed no hints of emotions, much like his big, white eyes. However, the contempt in his tone made all that self-control futile.

"Neji nii-san...?"

"Hinata-sama," the boy, her cousin, replied icily. As they were alone—and according to his Byakugan, they would likely remain so for a while—Neji did not bow like a member of the Branch house should when greeting a "superior" Main house member. He instead kept staring silently at his cousin, the person he was supposed to protect with his life.

The intensity of the unnerving glare briefly scrambled Hinata's thoughts, but in a couple seconds she recovered and processed his warning. A minute later and her training equipment was now near Neji, protected from the sun thanks to the edge of the manor's roof, and she now stood face-to-face with him.

He seemed unwilling to start a conversation, and while Hinata's more sensible side told her that accepting it—all of it—was for the best and that she should go back to her training and hope boredom would force him to leave... she wanted to say something. However, common topics like "how are you doing" were futile with him, she knew. He'd merely reply that "the life of a Branch house member should not worry you, Hinata-sama," and they'd go nowhere. Well, she'd go nowhere, he'd go anywhere else.

Small talk was not her forte, and accepting that, she sat beside him on the wooden floor and resumed her training. Neji's mere presence affected her emotional state; she knew she was being judged in some way, and the reflection of this was in how much the water obeyed her. Simply keeping the water in the same form the bowl had shaped it was now a bit of a struggle, and more water than usual was lost between the transfer from one small bowl to the other.

That was on her first try. By the seventh she had fully immersed herself in the exercise again, her cousin's silent presence blocked from her mind. Neji had watched every detail, thanks to his Byakugan... and he wasn't impressed.

After her twelfth attempt, he couldn't contain himself anymore. " _This_ is all you've learned from the ninjutsu lesson?"

Neji meant to question the lesson rather than Hinata herself, but she took the question as an insult. With barely concealed irritation, she retrieved one of the bowls and offered it to him. "I-It's harder than it l-looks."

"Is that so?"

Not one to ignore a challenge, Neji approached her and placed his hand close to the water. He replicated what she had done to the best of his ability, but his chakra couldn't even move a drop... _exactly_ like Hinata had expected. After all, if her cousin wasn't an anomaly like herself, then his affinity was Lightning.

It was only a natural result, but as childish as it was, a small, envious part of her enjoyed watching him fail at something she was good at, even if she tried to push that feeling away.

Frowning, Neji crossed his arms while Hinata placed the bowl back inside the bigger one.

"Kakashi-sensei wants us to master basic elemental manipulation before teaching anything else," Hinata continued, both the conversation and her training. "There was also a theoretical lesson on that kind of ninjutsu. It was... surprisingly helpful."

Neji scoffed. "I hope it is worth my time," he said, voice dripping with arrogance. "I accepted to be part of Hokage-sama's project with the intent of learning about and how to fight against advanced ninjutsu and genjutsu, rather than practicing those techniques myself. You know that our clan frowns upon people dedicating themselves to those areas before they master the Gentle Fist."

She felt the accusation and had to focus harder to get her chakra to mix with the water. "Yes, I-I'm aware, but... otou-sama allowed us to. He said to me, b-before, that it was okay in our case."

Hinata's arm slowly lifted, and with it the water followed. The mass of liquid—smaller than usual—trembled, and some of it fell as it hovered above the bowl.

"Hiashi-sama only allowed it because he sees your fate for what it is, and no longer cares."

Her connection with the water broke completely; the resulting splash soaked her hands and arms up to the coat's elbow. Hinata did not move an inch.

"After hearing about your return during breakfast, Hinata-sama... I had wondered if, perhaps, you had changed in any way after having your first taste of the real world. But clearly, you have not. You are still the same _pathetic_ girl that left the village two weeks ago."

Hinata physically recoiled, as if Neji had slapped her. Her hands slowly, very slowly, retracted closer to her body, almost as if to protect herself.

"What do you hope to accomplish with that? Do you think you can grow stronger? Are you happy with the intended results? With how much learning those new tricks will actually help you become the heiress you were supposed to be?"

Her breathing was quickening. "I... I... I am—"

"Just running away, like you always do," he cut her off with a glare she felt, but didn't dare to see. "The only thing I don't know is if you realized that you'll never become strong enough to learn techniques like the Rotation and grew desperate or if you are genuinely delusional and think you can improve like this. It's useless."

Hinata knew that Neji was wrong. She knew she could improve. She knew she could become more useful—and hadn't she already? She knew she had changed! As a person, as a kunoichi... the "same" Hinata from two weeks before would've died on that bridge.

All of that was on the tip of her tongue, just waiting to be let out, but...

 _"You'll never strong enough."_

Her voice betrayed her.

"But in the end, I suppose it's no different than what you've been doing these past few years," he continued, mercilessly. "I've seen you training, Hinata-sama, and it was a complete waste of your time. You were born a failure and you _will_ die a failure, no matter how much you struggle to escape that fate."

 _"Failure. Failure. Failure,"_ echoed inside her mind repeatedly, mingling with the drumming of her own heartbeat.

"Destiny cannot be outrun, Hinata-sama. You know this and ye—"

"ENOUGH!"

The nearby sliding doors opened with a slam. Hinata only wished that was her voice, but it wasn't.

"Get away from her!"

Guided by instinct and the sound, Neji danced around a deadly palm thrust that came from behind him and swept his feet, tripping his assailant. The person tumbled near Hinata and almost crashed into her training equipment.

Neji's eyes were wide-open. Though the person now wore an orange jacket and red skirt instead of the clan's traditional training clothes, he recognized them.

"Hanabi-sama?!"

The girl, whose Byakugan was active, met Hinata's eyes for but one moment. Hanabi turned around, her eyes blazing with a ferocity Hinata had never seen before on her little sister.

"You jerk..." she cursed as she tried to get up.

"Hanabi-sama, I ca—"

"I don't _care_ about your excuses!"

Hanabi's fingers blurred in a sequence of hand signs. Hinata did not recognize it at first, but when Neji did, and when his legs gave out on him even before Hanabi completed the sequence, she already had leaped into action.

Hanabi yelped as Hinata's wet hands clasped her right wrist forcefully and struggled out of panic, trying to pull away. "Onee-sama, what're you doing?!"

"Hanabi, stop! _Now_!"

The commanding, forceful tone coming from _Hinata_ of all people came as such as shock to Hanabi that her arm went limp under Hinata's grip before she even realized it.

Hinata released her and dried her hands on her coat before approaching Neji.

"Neji nii-san...?" she called him, but there was no reaction.

He was still looking in Hanabi's direction, but his gaze was unfocused; he was clearly somewhere else... and Hinata knew where. Despite her young age, she still clearly remembered the only other time she had seen an expression of pure terror on Neji's face.

It had been when Hiashi activated the caged bird seal of his own brother, Neji's father, leaving the young boy to watch helplessly as his father convulsed on the floor, screaming in unbearable pain. The same seal Hanabi had been about to activate in his forehead.

Hinata crouched beside him and gently shook his shoulder.

"Neji nii-san," she called more firmly. She had to repeat herself a couple more times until he snapped out of it, shifting his confused eyes towards her. "Can you stand?" she asked offering her hand.

She saw fury flashing in his white eyes as he recognized the worry in her features.

"I don't need your _pity_...!" he batted her hand away, growling dangerously as he rose by his own power. "Especially not from a false like you."

Hinata, dumbfounded by the accusation, subconsciously took a step back. Her mouth parted, but she was interrupted before the question formed.

"What are you still doing here?!" Hanabi demanded. "Get out!"

Neji almost complied immediately... but he couldn't help himself, and his eyes met Hinata's one last time.

"Hiashi-sama, Hanabi-sama... when are you going to fight your own battles?"

" _OUT!_ "

He didn't dare to push his luck further.

The door closed. With Neji no longer on her sights, Hanabi aimed her anger at her sister instead.

"I can't believe you sided with him! Just... why?!"

Hinata sighed wearily. _'How can I possibly explain something so illogical as that?'_

Why she still wanted to repair their bond was something Hinata had never been able to determine for sure. She wanted to believe it was lingering love, born from when they were small children and their families were still whole, but... the way Neji could be so _brutal_ to her psyche made her doubt herself.

Could it be that she just pitied him because of his situation, or still felt guilt over being the reason he lost his father? Maybe she just wanted his love again out of a needy selfishness, or was simply unable to accept his feelings changed so much? Or perhaps he was right... she was just running away, seeking to befriend him again in hopes of never having to face the truth in his harsh words again.

...Hinata could not to reply Hanabi's indignation. Instead, she crouched to the young girl's level and changed topic.

"You were going to use the seal, weren't you?"

"I was." Hanabi's Byakugan receded. "Otou-sama said to—"

"Please," Hinata held her hand, "forget what our father said, just this once," she pleaded. "Our clan is divided, but the Branch house members are still human, Hanabi-chan. You can't hurt other people just because they have a different opinion or because of petty things... that is very, very wrong."

"...Wrong? _Wrong?!_ " the younger girl raised the volume again. "And you think what he was doing wasn't wrong too?!"

"T-That's... that's something—"

"Something called bullying and it's not a good thing," Hanabi interrupted, taking a deep breath to keep her frustration at bay. "I... didn't tell you about this last night, since it didn't have anything to do with me but... there was some confusion in our class four days ago or so. There's this boy whose nose is always running for some weird reason, and a few older kids decided to pick on him and call him names during break and after class. His best friend got hurt trying to defend him, and later on Iruka-sensei spoke about bullying."

"But this isn't l—"

"It is!" Hanabi cut her off, her voice trembling with worry. "Onee-sama... he made you cry!"

Hinata's hand went to her face. Though she had dried her hand before, it was wet once again. _'I didn't even notice...'_

Hanabi closed the gap between them and embraced her, burying her face on Hinata's chest. "I'm sorry I didn't come in sooner... I-I heard him, but it took me too much time to truly understand what he was doing. I'm sorry!"

Smiling ruefully, Hinata wiped the tears away and hugged her back. "Don't worry... I'm fine; everything is fine."

They remained like that for a while, and Hinata knew that while she had her day free, her sibling did not.

"Hanabi, it's almost nine. You'll be late to your classes." The little girl whimpered in response as Hinata released her. "You don't want Natsu-san to come hunt you down, do you?"

"Ugh," Hanabi cringed. Her retainer was very strict when it came to punctuality. "Okay, I'll go... but, are you sure you're fine?"

"I'm sure." Hinata tried her best smile, but going from Hanabi's doubtful, still-worried look, she wasn't sure she succeeded.

Nonetheless, the younger girl managed to say her goodbyes and left Hinata to stare at a closed door after she left.

Finally alone, Hinata leaned against the wall near the door and let her body slowly slump to the floor.

"...What an amazing older sister you are."

To further damp her mood, perhaps literally, her eyes fell to her training equipment. In the heat of the moment she had failed to notice it, but she had knocked the bowls in her attempt to stop Hanabi. There was water all over the wooden floor, and some of it was dripping down to the ground. The bowls, at least, were still whole, but...

She groaned. It was official.

"I _really_ should've slept in today."

* * *

By the time Hinata was done cleaning up her mess, she had lost most of her motivation to keep training. Or to do much of anything, really.

While half-heartedly debating whether to try reading her book or to check on her mother's garden again, as she had done right after breakfast, Hinata went back to her room to change out of her wet clothes.

She was not expecting to find her retainer about to knock on her door.

"Ko?"

The man turned. He was clad in the traditional clothes for a jonin in their village, like what Kakashi was usually seen with. He differed from the norm a little by wearing a bandanna with the village's forehead protector sewn in, hiding his short, brown hair from view.

"Ah, Hinata-sama. It has been a while," he greeted her with a smile.

She returned it, walking towards him. "It has. Um, what brings you here?" she asked. It wasn't odd for her to interact with Ko during the day, but he was never in mission clothes while doing so.

"Now that you are a genin and are starting to work on missions, Hiashi-sama allowed me to do the same provided our schedules match. Or at least come close to," he reminded her. Ko had essentially given up on being a normal shinobi in order to be her retainer, but now that she was under Kurenai's watch, his services weren't as necessary—she wondered if his salary went down because of it.

"I just reported my arrival to Hiashi-sama," Ko continued, "but he ordered me to escort you to him before I could do anything else. So here I am!" he laughed.

"...But I know where his office is?" she argued, confusion turning the sentence into a question.

"You see, Hias—oh. Perhaps you should change before we continue," he suggested, noticing her soaked sleeves.

He opened her room's door and stepped away.

"I-I'll be right back!"

* * *

"Here we are, Hinata-sama."

They were standing in front of the metal gates that led to the clan's cemetery.

"...You really weren't kidding," she mumbled in response. Ko had taken her outside the compound and through the surrounding area until they came to the border of the territory under command of the Hyuuga clan—informally known as the village's "Hyuuga district". While most Hyuuga lived in the compound, commerce and business were not allowed inside, so these buildings flourished around it instead.

"Hiashi-sama ordered me to wait for your return here," Ko said. Along the way, they had talked about each other's missions and Ko had been especially interested in hearing about Hinata's new friends, but that conversation would have to wait. "You remember how to get there?"

"Y-Yes."

"Good." Her shoulders betrayed her tension, Ko observed. "If we are lucky, Hiashi-sama won't accompany you back and we can continue our little chat," he offered with a brief laugh, which failed to lighten the mood.

It called for another approach. "Hinata-sama, he didn't look angry or disappointed. I'm sure you have nothing to worry about."

This time he got a little smile. "Thank you, Ko. Let's hope you're right."

Without further ado, she walked inside, leaving Ko to guard the cemetery's only entrance.

Once his charge was far enough, the man activated his Byakugan. Hinata and Hiashi were the only living people inside... with the exception of the grave keeper and his family, who had accepted their clan head's "suggestion" to have lunch out, earlier than normal, and were about to leave the place for at least a couple hours, likely headed to a fancy restaurant to spend the money Hiashi had presented them with.

Ko's job was to ensure father and daughter would be completely alone, but nothing stopped him from wondering.

"What could be so important that Hiashi-sama needs this much privacy..."

* * *

Hinata had been told all her life that the cursed seal that separated her clan in two disappeared upon death, in a process that dealt irreversible damage to the user's eyes, brain, and everything that was related to their unique bloodline in one fell swoop.

But it took her just a minute inside the graveyard to see that it was a farce. Those that were sealed no longer carried that mark in their corpses, but a divide was still there. There was nothing tangible that separated the graves of her clansmen from each other, no line, no gate... but the quality of the nearby gravestones spoke by itself, suddenly turning fancier and more elaborate as she approached the central area of the graveyard.

 _"You can't outrun fate,"_ rung out inside her head. Whether it was because of her musings or because she saw a silhouette far ahead, she didn't know.

The very center of the graveyard was reserved for the Clan Heads and their families... and her father stood near one of the graves, with his back towards her.

She recognized it.

It was all a horrible blur, but Hinata still remembered the thick amethyst-colored stone slab that loomed over her mother's final resting place. Flower pots surrounded the grave, each with a different kind of flower that she could remember seeing in her mother's garden, creating a beautiful and colorful fence around it.

 _'Weird,'_ she thought. There was nothing wrong with the grave, but it was somewhat isolated from other graves in the same area.

Ignoring the oddity, she continued forward, making no effort to hide her approach. It did come as a surprise that Hiashi, who was right beside the grave, did not react until she was only a couple meters away.

"Ah, Hinata."

"...Oto—"

"No, please," he motioned for her to halt. "Not this time."

Hinata slowly straightened. _'So... this is how it's going to be.'_

"I have much to tell you, Hinata. While I ask that you listen to what I have to say, please, don't keep any questions you might have for yourself. You will have many, I assure you, and you can't have any by the time we're done."

"O...kay?" she quirked an eyebrow.

Hiashi nodded. "I suppose it is better for me to begin with what I could not answer yesterday. Since you do not join the clan for breakfast," he said, without accusations, "you wouldn't know this, but I called for a brief meeting with the council right afterwards. I shared with them some of what you told me yesterday, and we've come to a new conclusion about your duel with Hanabi for the title of heiress."

 _'Okay... this is it.'_ Hinata thought, steeling herself.

"As of now, the duel will happen... five years from today."

"I see," Hinata nodded.

Hiashi calmly watched her process what he actually said.

"Wait, _w-what?!_ D-d-don't you mean five days? Or five weeks?!"

"I do not. You heard correctly: five years."

She stopped to reflect on that—and to calm down. On one hand, wasn't that great? She'd have a lot more time to enjoy her freedom!

But...

"W-Why wait so long if everyone already knows how this will end? I-It doesn't make sense!"

Hiashi's gaze fell to the grave beside him. "Because I made a promise... to your mother."

Hinata kept staring at him and then at the grave, completely lost.

"You said everyone knows how this will end," Hiashi began, "but _you_ don't. Tell me: what are you expecting to happen to the loser of this duel?"

"I-I will... um, _she_ would need to marry someone powerful to benefit the clan, b-because she cannot be the heiress, but is still in an important enough position to achieve such a... er, feat?"

He raised an eyebrow at her choice of words.

"Under normal circumstances, you'd be right. The heirs—heiresses—in this case, can choose who they want to marry almost freely." Hinata's head tilted at the last word. "Siblings, however, have the duty to bring power to the clan through other means by marrying into important families and increasing our clan's reach and influence. But the rules have changed for you two. The loser will be... _sealed_."

Hinata caught it, in that last word. Hiashi wasn't doing a great job in hiding or blocking out his emotions anymore—It seeped through his posture, his voice, his eyes. She didn't know if he was letting go on purpose or if she was just too familiar with self-loathing and that particular brand of pain it came with to possibly miss it. However...

 _"Hiashi-sama... he sees your fate for what it is, and no longer cares."_

Her head lowered and her fists clenched; Hinata didn't know what to believe in anymore. Somehow, she wasn't even surprised.

But she needed to hear it.

"How could you?" she choked out, straining to keep her voice flat. "Just... how could you do this to... to... us?"

"It was not my decision. It was the elders who pushed for it."

"B-But _you_ are the clan head! They can't order you around... can they?"

For the first time, their eyes met and Hiashi was the one who looked away in shame.

"Only in extreme scenarios, where the entirety of the council disagrees with the clan head," he explained. "This is one of the council's purposes: to moderate the clan head's power and stop them from abusing it."

The thought gave her pause. "...Abusing it?"

"One of the clan head's duties is to ensure the heir is well-prepared to lead, from their childhood until the day they become the new head. And I..." Hiashi sighed, shaking his head. "Hinata, I will be frank and objective with you: I did not believe that you'd be a better candidate to lead the clan than your sister."

 _'...Well. That's news.'_ Having it spelled out for her didn't hurt as much as she had imagined.

"Because I was remiss in preparing you for the role and hadn't overseen as much of your training as I should've, the elders grew worried. Some of them believe you will not be a warrior worthy of leading our clan, others don't think you have the personality that they believe is "proper" for the station, and there are also some who think it's too late for you to start learning the intricacies of the job now that you are an on-duty kunoichi. In other words, all of them believe you are inadequate and that your sister is the better choice, hence why they pushed me to have you two duel for the title of heiress."

"...I'm sorry, I-I don't understand," Hinata confessed with a weak voice. It was no surprise that people didn't believe in her—most of the time, she was no different. It was also no surprise that they'd push for the duel assuming she'd lose to Hanabi. Those things she could understand, but...

"Why have this... ch-change of rules?" Her voice wavered and her head hung low, but not out of shame. _'Am I this much of an embarrassment to the clan? That... even my own grandfather would want to get rid of me like that?'_

"I know it sounds like nonsense to resort to the seal," Hiashi replied, stoically. "Marriage to a clan as prestigious and influential as ours is something that many powerful families would be interested in, but whatever "value" one could have as a bride is lost with the seal. If the husband comes to care enough, the fact that we could kill his wife so easily and painfully would turn him into our puppet."

Hinata now understood the "almost" that confused her before. _'I wonder how many love stories this stupid seal has ruined...'_

"On paper," Hiashi drew her attention again, "the council as a whole is only interested in making sure you cannot be the heiress, as simply losing the title to Hanabi doesn't take you out of the line of succession. They justified my _abuse,_ " he growled, fists clenching, "by arguing that you were both too unfit and too unprepared to risk you somehow managing to become clan head if something were to happen to your sister, and that keeping you as the heiress or a potential heiress for so long was irresponsible and an abuse of my powers.

"These debates about you being fit or not to lead were occasional occurrences in the council these past few years, but it wasn't until recently that _all_ of the elders were convinced that denying you a chance of being the clan head was for the best, mostly thanks to your sister's fighting prowess."

Hinata couldn't fault that logic. While, yes, she had held back to variable degrees whenever she and Hanabi fought, she couldn't deny that her younger sister was extremely talented in the Gentle Fist and would be much stronger than herself if not for the age difference. She was sure she could beat Hanabi once if she really tried, but consistently? Not as much.

 _'And what does this have to do with mother?'_ she wondered, watching as Hiashi grew silent and gazed towards the grave once again. _'He said something about a promise before, too...'_

It was almost as if Hiashi could hear her thoughts. "Your mother... she despised the caged bird seal and all that it entailed," he spoke without facing Hinata. "Before she died, she made me promise to not let you or Hanabi ever be sealed. I promised, thinking at the time that you two weren't in any such danger. If it wasn't just her paranoia... perhaps she had seen something I hadn't. But I suppose the cause doesn't matter—you share some of your mother's opinions and it shows," he raised his head to meet Hinata eye-to-eye. "I noticed that you try to treat those from the Branch house as if they are equals, with kindness. The problem... is that others have noticed that as well."

 _'...So what?'_ Hinata though.

Hiashi could see her indifference, her ignorance... her innocence. He held back a sigh.

"Hinata, have you ever wondered about your mother's parents?"

"Um... no," she said, frowning a bit. It was hard for her to keep up with the topic changing so often. "I was never told anything about my grandmother, and I just know my other grandfather died long before I was born."

Hiashi's stance shifted, eyes landing on a grave much farther than where they were. "Your maternal grandfather, in particular... he is the key for you to understand what is happening today." Hinata turned to follow him, but the man did nothing to point out which one in that sea of graves was the correct one. He just scowled in that direction.

"I don't know much about your maternal grandmother. I was only told that... she was not a Hyuuga from the Main family."

Hinata's eyes grew wide. "Huh? B-But you just said—"

"It's a different case," he cut her off. "Your grandfather lived outside of the compound, in a fancy, small mansion by the little park between our home and the marketplace, which he bought with money he made as a shinobi. Your grandmother was not his wife. No... she, and every single one of the Branch members that lived with him—all of them young women—were better described as his slaves."

His far-off glare somehow grew stronger; if not for her last mission, Hinata would've been trembling from the killing intent he released.

No, she trembled for another reason entirely.

"Your grandfather was a sick, twisted individual. He trapped his servants in his mansion and used the seal to force them to do anything he desired, or else he'd beat them up or torture them with the seal and threaten to do the same to their families. He specifically sought women that weren't trained as warriors so that they'd never be able to fight back or trap him, let alone manage to escape. And you mother... she was not a child born out of love."

Hinata, who was as blank as a sheet by then, didn't need to be told anything.

"Your grandfather wanted an heir, so he forced your grandmother to keep the child and didn't have Hikari sealed. That's not to say she escaped his control; she loved her mother very much, and he used that love to keep his daughter on a tight leash. But the bastard made one fatal mistake." Hiashi turned to his beloved's grave again, giving it—no, _her_ —a smile of both sorrow and pride. "He sent her to the academy, to uphold the family tradition. Officially, he died fighting with his sole daughter against a thief who broke into their house, with one of the servants also dying in the cross-fire. But your mother told me the truth. She was but a few years older than you when she saw her father, drunk, beat her mother to death. It almost cost Hikari her life... but she killed him with her own two hands on that night."

As Hiashi fell into silence, Hinata hugged herself, shaking as she tried and failed to stop her fertile imagination from painting that tale—the suffering her mother and those women had endured—in her weak mind. To think, she had almost given up so many times for so much less...

Hinata had never wanted to hug her mother as strongly as she did in that moment.

"Hinata... please calm down," Hiashi pleaded uneasily, unsure of what he could do.

The girl looked up and offered a minute nod. She tried to numb her senses, focusing on nothing but her lungs for a few seconds.

Eventually, Hiashi decided to proceed. "I think you understand now just how badly our clan's seal can be misused. That it goes far beyond punishing a servant because he spilled water on you during breakfast, or for breaking an expensive vase while cleaning."

She nodded again.

"It was your mother that showed this truth to me. Because she, like yourself, was so openly in favor of the Branch and against the seal, many in the Main house feared that she would influence me after I began to court her. Your grandfather was an extreme case, but he is not the only one to abuse the seal's powers. Our engagement was... turbulent, for a lack of better word."

"Turbulent?" Hinata echoed, but Hiashi shook his head.

"I never tried to modify the status quo of our clan significantly; as far as they know, she couldn't make my opinion change too much. Truth is, I tried to look for a way to fix this, but I couldn't find any fuuinjutsu specialists skilled enough to make a seal better than the one we have, so it was futile to bring it up to the council. I'd also need to find a way of safely erasing the current seals, which from what I gather would be even harder."

His eyes then darted around until they landed on a grave far, far away from where Hikari's was. If the inner-most part of the cemetery was for the clan head's family... then that grave was a glaring exception.

 _'If I had looked harder... would it have changed anything?'_

Hiashi never saw Hinata's eyes sparkling as everything began to fit together. It was such a ridiculous notion, but nothing else made sense to her.

"They... fear me. They fear me, right?" she repeated, bringing Hiashi's gaze to herself again. "They think that if I become the Clan Head, that I'll try to get rid of the seal. They don't want—no, they _can't_ risk that happening! ...Right?"

Hiashi almost allowed a small smile to show, if not for the topic at hand.

"For some members of the council and other nobles of our clan, it's too big a risk. But I won't lie—even I am not comfortable with uniting our clan just yet. There's still too much bad blood between us, and if you consider that the majority of our clan is from the Branch and that very few people in the Main house are ninja... it's a tricky situation that needs to be handled very carefully lest it sparks a tragedy."

Hinata scowled. _'I guess it's a good thing I don't have any power... I never thought of this.'_

"Regardless," Hiashi went on, "you already made your stance over the matter too clear for them. You'd either lose to your sister and become unable to change anything... or your sister gets the seal, and if you come too close to that goal, Hanabi pays the price."

Hinata had an objection. "But nobody knows me and Hanabi are close— _ah!_ "

Seeing his daughter's hands flying to futilely cover her mouth, as if she had said a secret he wasn't supposed to know... Hiashi couldn't help but chuckle a bit at her expense.

The girl blanched. "Y-Y-You knew...!"

He scoffed mid-laugh. "Of course I knew."

He didn't seem mad at least, which made Hinata relax a bit, but she still felt foolish. _'I thought we hid it so well... no, wait. Could it be?'_

There were only two other people who were supposed to know she and Hanabi had a bond.

"Did Ko or Natsu tell you?"

"Fret not, Hinata," he shook his head, still amused. "Your retainers are supposed to report to me, but you two earned their loyalty. I just had my suspicions. Your grandfather never allowed me—or himself—to get too close to my brother Hizashi for this very reason, but I was too young to understand that and I often sneaked away to play with him. My retainer, too, always covered for us..."

Hinata felt like trash for doubting them. "I-I see..."

"I doubt anyone else would know—they are not even considering you might win. Regardless, we've strayed off-topic," Hiashi cleared his throat. "I believe you now have a good grasp on everything that led us to your duel with Hanabi, correct?"

"Hmm..."

The girl hesitated for a few moments, mentally reviewing what she knew just in case. It was rather convenient for Hiashi, who took the time to steel himself until Hinata eventually nodded.

"These past couple weeks while you were away, I... was trying to accept that I had failed. That I could do nothing but watch... and yet," Hiashi unfurled something from inside his robe, "all of that changed with this."

Hinata easily recognized the item. "The report I brought you yesterday...?"

"Do you remember how I told you that certain members of the council were against letting you succeed me because of your lack of skill?"

The bluntness made her wince. "Y-Yes."

"This report was key in convincing these specific elders such as your grandfather to reconsider. Hinata, you've been trying to use a special taijutsu style that is incompatible with your body. It is only natural that you achieved no more than mediocrity... and this is how I managed to bargain for an extra five years. As my firstborn, you deserve to be given a fair chance at proving yourself."

She frowned, which Hiashi failed to see as her head was low and her bangs hid it.

"With this much time," he continued obliviously, "we can investigate what effect your Water affinity truly has on the Gentle Fist and modify the style to suit what you are capable of. We also have the time to develop new jutsu, as I don't think your body will be able to handle certain advanced techniques such as the Rotation. At least not anytime soon."

For a brief moment, Hinata found herself at a crossroad. Her heart _needed_ her to press a certain statement Hiashi made, but her brain dictated there was something more important for her to ask.

In the end, she had to go with logic first.

"I don't see the point. I-It's not like this will change the result... your promise, I mean."

"Ah, your training? No, it will not. But it offers us more time to seek a way out."

She looked up. Stalling tactics were not what she expected from her father. "So... t-there's no plan?"

"A concrete one we can rely on?" he shook his head, sighing inaudibly. "No, this is just a gamble. We don't know anything about how or even _if_ your Water affinity will bring enough differences to justify five years of training. I don't like it, but we lack any other option. There are, however, two things we can try."

One was obvious to Hinata. "Finding a way around the seal is the first, right?"

"Exactly. I haven't had success, but I admit I had stopped looking until very recently. You can also try to search on your own, Hinata, such as during missions outside of Konoha or when you go to another village during a chunin exam. As for the second option..."

The way Hiashi looked at her made Hinata have no doubts: she was not going to like it.

"A marriage contract." He held his hand when her mouth opened. "I know. I said the rules had changed, but keep in mind that you are too young for the clan to search for a husband. With five years, Hinata... _you_ could find a husband for yourself before we hit the deadline."

She almost choked. _'Is he serious?!'_

Hiashi chose to ignore her shock. "If the clan were to search, we'd aim for someone that we benefit from but is less powerful than the Hyuuga, to incorporate them into the clan. But nothing stops you from giving up on being a potential heiress if you were to marry someone that holds more or equal power than us. In that case you'd be incorporated into their family instead of remaining a Hyuuga, and would not be in danger anymore."

 _'He actually is serious!'_ she realized with dread. _'There's no way I can find a husband on my own, let alone someone who can get me out of this mess!'_

She had to make it clear to him before he got his hopes up. "I-I-I'm not sure you understand what you're asking of _me_..."

"It can be easier than you imagine, Hinata," Hiashi insisted, hoping to calm her. "Your team, for example: the Aburame clan is one of the village's four noble clans like the Hyuuga. The Inuzuka clan isn't as prestigious but it can work, though your other teammate is not the current heir so he is not a safe choice."

"There's no way I can do that!" she blurted out, face scrunched up in revulsion. "T-They are like brothers to me!"

"Hmm... feelings can change, Hinata. But in this case, does this not mean they'd be acceptable people for you to spend your life with? If they feel like you do, perhaps they'd be open to the possibility of marrying just on paper, to help you. You could always divorce later, once it's safer."

The girl frowned and found a sudden interest in one of the nearby flower pots by Hikari's grave. She mumbled something Hiashi couldn't decipher, but he got the message and moved on.

"The Hokage's project you're part of also gives us other candidates. The Uchiha, Akimichi and Nara clans heirs are all enlisted. You'd have ample time and the opportunity to get to know them."

Hinata almost entirely dismissed that idea. _'I can't betray Sakura like that—not that I think I could manage to bond with Sasuke-san like that anyway. Shikamaru-san is completely and absolutely out of question. I don't know Choji-kun very well, but... hmm. I think he could actually work. As long as he keeps his hands away from my cinnamon rolls, that is.'_

"These are the easiest options for you," Hiashi kept going. "Here in Konoha, there aren't any male clan heirs of your age remaining... your only other choices would be people from outside. For example, if you manage to meet a clan heir of another village or a high-ranking politician or businessman during missions and they become interested, it's an option we have. You... must keep an open mind, Hinata," he added with unease, seeing her poorly masked discontentment.

 _'My feelings are not the problem here,'_ she thought, eyes trained on a pot of purple sunflowers.

"...Nonetheless," Hiashi cleared his throat, "don't worry yourself with that right now. That's our last resort, and we won't have the chance to use it if you don't focus on your training."

The girl looked up, puzzled for but a moment. "Ah... I see. They will call it off if I don't show results."

Hiashi nodded approvingly. "Between missions and the Hokage's project, you will be busier than the average genin... and I'm afraid it won't end there. As I mentioned, I haven't taught you anything about politics, war or the management of our clan's businesses. Hanabi is at an age I can begin to teach her, and I want you to learn from me as well."

Hinata's eyes squinted slightly, as if trying to find something in Hiashi's face. _'He wouldn't... would he?'_

"Thanks to this, Hinata, I'm sure you will have some leniency for at least the rest of the year. But if you cannot show any meaningful results with this new style..."

"Then I'll ultimately get sealed... and... and..."

She looked away.

"And?"

"...And so what?"

The folder in Hiashi's hands fell to the ground, crushing a leaf that was as dead as the girl's tone had been.

"Co... come again?"

If Hinata was surprised her father stuttered, she didn't show it.

"So what if I lose and get sealed?"

She motioned to the grave, all while almost glaring at him.

"My m-mother... is dead. So why are you going so far j-just for a promise? Even after what I told you? You... you have no obligation to the child of a-another man."

"...Another man?" Hiashi stared back at her, baffled. "What are you talking about?"

Hinata soon mirrored his expression. "Y-You mean you didn't figure it out yet?!"

"Hinata, what are you talking about?" he repeated, firmly.

She began to fidget. "I... I... m-my affinity."

The idea of having to spell it out for him made her hesitate, but that was just enough information for Hiashi to catch on.

"You mean to say you can't be my daughter because your affinity isn't Lightning?"

In a most contradictory mix of dread and relief, the girl nodded.

"So you have forgotten. Well, I suppose you were too young..."

 _'Huh?'_

Hinata almost managed to blurt out a question, but Hiashi turned his back on her before she could. He then began to gather his hair into a bunch with one hand, and raised it. With the other, he pulled the back of his collar a bit and pointed to a spot on his nape.

"Do you recognize something?"

Hinata came closer and stood on her tiptoes. Her eyes easily found a small patch of light brown skin, shaped like a pear. It was no bigger than her pinky's nail.

"Huh... Hanabi-chan has a birthmark there, just like this one. Um, but what of it?"

When Hiashi faced her again, it was with the blankest of stares.

She felt a blush creeping up her cheeks. "...Oh."

"This birthmark has been on my side of the family for generations, and you, Hinata, have it as well. That, and I _know_ your mother would've never betrayed me. You _are_ my daughter. There is no other possibility and there never was."

Watching as the girl's hand dug inside her coat to touch where she thought the birthmark was, Hiashi was left to amend that statement in his mind. _'I suppose it's theoretically possible she could be Hizashi's daughter,'_ he thought as he bent to recover the folder. _'Not a possibility worth considering.'_

Soon, Hinata realized the futility of trying to find a birthmark with her fingers and instead buried her face in her hands in hopes of muffling a growl of frustration. _'I can't believe I worried so much over absolutely nothing! Twice!'_

Hiashi _felt_ her anger in the air and winced. "I... I apologize. I suppose my reaction to your affinity being Water mislead you."

She didn't look at him. _'No, you think?'_

"The possibility never even crossed my mind. It's just that... once I connected the dots about your affinity how that could have an impact on the Gentle Fist, this idea of buying you more time formed in my mind almost all at once. It... just seemed too good to be true."

Hiashi then began to speak about how he spent the previous night researching things and actually had a theory about why her affinity could be different, but Hinata only barely heard it.

At first, it was just raw frustration that didn't allow her to focus, but then her mind latched on to what he had said.

 _'...Too good to be true?'_

It was almost funny. Whatever he meant, she realized those words had a meaning for her as well.

She realized that Hiashi being her father changed nothing.

"Y-You didn't answer me," she accused once he finished, eyes down and fists curled. She had tried not to, but her tone was unsubtly hostile.

Hiashi remembered her questions perfectly. "...I'm afraid I don't understand," he said while placing the report folder inside his robe's inner pocket.

"So what if I lose and get sealed?" she repeated her first question. Instead of doing the same for the second, Hinata chose to reword it. "Why... all of a sudden, w-why do you even care about what happens to me?! I-I don't... It can't be just a promise."

Though afraid of what she'd see, Hinata dared to meet her father's eyes. Her vision was blurring, but he was unmistakably looking at her in the same way she had seen him look at Hikari's grave. It became clearer and clearer as he closed the gap between them.

 _'No more running away,'_ Hiashi decided.

His approach made Hinata feel like a deer who was being stalked by a lion.

"You're right. It's not just the promise," he said, in a gentle voice Hinata hadn't heard in _years._

He lowered himself to one knee, to her level. His eyes, no longer able to stand to see her turmoil while knowing it was his fault, closed so that he could center himself. Only after a deep breath in the darkness that they opened again.

"You, Hinata, are my daughter. I can't let something as horrible as that happen to you. If you still need an answer to that question..."

Hiashi's right hand rose, and he found the courage to do something he had never done since Hikari's death.

"...It's because I love you.

Smiling, and with all the care of someone handling the frailest of jewels, he stroked his daughter's cheek, like he had once done every single day, right after giving her a goodnight kiss.

Hinata trembled under her father's gentle touch. Her heart was working twice as hard; as far as she knew, her lungs were not working at all.

Hiashi could feel a warm, wet trail travel down his hand.

With an involuntary sniff, she found the air again. And with it, as weak as it was, her voice.

"Can... c-can y-you say that again?"

Her eyes, wide, bloodshot, sparkling. They pleaded with him. They _begged_ him to confirm it.

His smile broadened. How could he deny her again?

"Hinata, you're my daughter. I love you..."

Where he once saw lavender eyes, he then saw only blue hair as she lowered her head. He couldn't see her tears, but he still felt them.

It was not the first time he caught her crying knowing it was his fault. But for the first time in years... Hiashi knew he could comfort her.

His arms moved to pull her closer to his chest, to _prove_ his words to her. He knew she doubted him, but for one moment, he felt bliss.

Because for one moment, he saw Hinata coming towards him out of her own volition... and so closed his eyes.

He heard her voice.

"You... you...!"

The next moment, his body was at gravity's mercy until it _smashed_ against hard plastic, earth, and then stone. His back hit the latter just in the right angle to take his breath away, adding to the pain in his skull from crashing against the grave.

" _YOU LIAR!_ "

She had pushed him away with all her strength.

"Y-You think I'm stupid... right?!"

His eyes shot open and the first thing he saw was the sky, and then Hinata by his feet. Her figure was becoming smaller as her feet carried her backward, but he could see her face perfectly.

A furious red stained with tears.

"For a second, I almost believed you," she said in a dangerously low voice, but surprising both of them, she then began to laugh. "I-It would've been so _easy!_ Ever since mother died, I've been wanting this... waiting for this. But... I know better! I know you're lying!"

Hiashi tried to call her name, but all he could do was gasp for breath. Where his voice failed, his limbs did not. One hand grasped the stone of Hikari's grave, the other found support on the ground, crushing a mortally wounded violet as he began to rise from the wreckage of flower pots.

The girl saw, in his eyes, that for once it was he the one out of the loop in their little chat. She gladly enlightened him.

"I was there," she sniffed. "B-behind the door. I-I was there, when Kurenai-sensei first came to our home."

Hiashi stumbled. _'No... no!'_

"You were so... so _busy_ training my sister that you didn't even hear or n-notice. But I was there. I heard it all!"

Despair flashed in Hiashi's wide eyes, and Hinata saw it. It made her certain that she was right.

"I heard when... when you... told her the clan didn't need me." She hiccuped, but continued between sniffs and tears. "T-that I was useless... that my presence was... inconvenient."

More and more tears fell from Hinata's eyes, forcing her to wipe them in order to see anything.

"After that... after all these years... you now want me to believe you _love_ me?!"

Hiashi crammed as much air in his wounded lungs as he could. "Hi... nata...!"

She ignored him.

"I don't know... I don't know what you truly need me for. What kind of _scheme_ you could possibly need my loyalty for. But I won't do it," she declared, glaring tearfully at her father with such fierceness she could've melted steel. "I refuse to help you!"

"Hinata, lis—!"

" _I REFUSE!_ "

Her screech echoed across the graveyard, and she bolted.

"Wait! Hinata!"

Seeing his daughter's figure fading from his vision, Hiashi rose and cursed under his ragged breath while activating his Byakugan.

He made a "stop" motion in a seemingly random direction... and Ko, who had already started to run from the cemetery's entrance towards Hinata, reluctantly halted

But Hinata did not. She didn't know where she was running to; she couldn't _see_ where she was running to, but she ran. She ran as fast as her legs could take her, breathing heavily, desperate to flee what her mind perceived as danger.

On the back of her mind, she knew it was a betrayal of the resolve she found in Wave, but she didn't care.

She _needed_ to get away.

That single directive erased all other thoughts from her brain, such as how she could've guided herself out of that place with her Byakugan.

...Or that she was fleeing from a jonin.

"Unngh! No!"

Two strong arms looped beneath her own and hoisted her up.

"Hinata, stop!"

She thrashed against her father's hold, screaming: "Let me go!"

In a motion Hinata's mind couldn't keep up with, Hiashi flipped her and switched his hold so that she'd face him. Her feet barely touched the ground, his hands gripped her by the elbow in a way that she'd be too far to headbutt or kick him.

"Please! _Please_ listen! This is a misunderstanding!"

He was dirty and begging. Yet her mind couldn't see it as anything but a farce.

"Let me explain!"

Hiashi was a good actor, she thought. His mask despair was _very_ convincing... but two could play that game.

Though she refused to let anything but fury and tears come from her eyes, she stilled as best as she could with her lungs on overdrive. Hiashi didn't release her nor did she expect him to, however... she had fooled a jonin once, and his Byakugan wasn't on anymore.

Just as she made the decision to gather chakra into her elbows... an unnaturally _cold_ wind blew through the cemetery.

For Hiashi, that meant his dirty hair flew all over his face. For the girl he held...

 _"Please, Hinata! Please... give him one chance!"_

In spite of her thick clothing, the cold froze her to the bones.

Perhaps it was her conscience, reminding her of the revelation about understanding. Or... maybe their fight had disturbed her mother's resting soul so deeply that Hikari managed to intervene in the world of the living somehow.

"Please, Hinata...!" Hiashi insisted.

...The fire left her eyes.

"O-One chance," she croaked as Hiashi lowered her to the ground, wiping her face once her arms were free.

"Very well," he smiled, visibly relieved. "What I have to tell you... needs to be in her presence."

Hinata nodded.

* * *

Seconds later, the pair stepped out of a gust of leaves, standing in front of Hikari Hyuuga once more.

Hinata gasped once she saw how so much of the beautiful decoration around her mother's grave was in shambles. Slowly, as her legs took her to the mess of earth, flowers and the pot's black plastic, it sunk in what she had done.

"I hope she can forgive me..." she mumbled, crouching to examine a pair of lilies which had been torn apart.

"She'd know you weren't at fault."

When Hinata rose and turned to face Hiashi, she almost stumbled backwards. Without being blinded by suspicions, without her cousin's venomous words ringing in her ears... she easily recognized his expression as genuine. She had seen it far too many times in her bathroom's mirror to mistake it.

The face of someone crumbling under the weight of their failures.

"Most emotions," Hiashi began, "don't come easily to me. In my childhood they had, because of your late uncle, but it didn't take long for my responsibilities and status as the clan head's heir to strain my relationship with him. And this might surprise you," he chuckled in self-deprecation, "but my father regarded me as a failure when I was younger, too. I was great with the Gentle Fist, but I wasn't a genius. I wasn't _enough_ for him... so, I allowed training, missions, war and the clan to consume me as I tried to become what was expected of me. One day I succeeded and... it felt hollow. My father finally approved of me, but still kept his distance like he had always done and still does. I knew something was missing... just not what."

Hinata could guess where he was going. "And then you met my mother."

Hiashi smiled as he nodded, and Hinata's eyebrows shot up when she noticed the unshed tears that made his white eyes shine.

"True to her name... Hikari was my light. Your mother taught me what the word happiness meant; that there was so much more to life than tirelessly working for the clan's sake. I began to see a warm meal as more than just sustenance, flowers as more than decoration, the places I saw outside of the village as more than battlegrounds, training as more than exercise... she taught me so much," he sighed wistfully, still smiling. "Your mother supported me every time I thought the pressures of being a clan head would finally get to me. I was never good at knowing when I was overworking myself, but she could always tell. She pushed me to reconnect with my brother, and even though she and my father hated each other's guts, your mother still tried to help me with him. From the little things to the bigger problems... she brought color to my world, Hinata."

 _'Heh... that was unexpectedly sweet,'_ Hinata thought, smiling beyond herself. _'And a little too well-constructed, too,'_ she added, wondering if perhaps her father had proposed with those words.

"And perhaps most importantly of all," Hiashi continued, "she brought life to my world, and gave me two wonderful, beautiful daughters. My father had given me an example of how to raise an heir, but not a child. When you came to this world, I was just so lost!" he laughed... bitterly. "Your mother made me believe I could be a good father... and she was the only reason I managed to keep going after your uncle died. She was my pillar and... without her to keep me standing I... I—!"

Hinata couldn't look at her father anymore. It was hard for the girl to keep herself from crying after listening to that story... but she felt that if it was not her father, someone had to remain whole.

"...It was if I had died with her... but I didn't. I knew I had to continue... for you, your sister, and the clan. But I... was _weak._ It was so much easier to just drown myself in my work and forget it all. It hurt so much to feel that I chose to forget it again, as if your mother had never changed anything in my life. Hanabi was easy to hand off to her retainer—she was a toddler and I couldn't give her the care she needed. And you, Hinata... I couldn't even _look_ at you!"

Hinata gasped, and not from the pain of hearing those words. It was from witnessing the strong, proud, powerful Hiashi Hyuuga sinking to his knees, with dirt all over his clothes... drowning in his guilt and shame, and tears—his hand blocked her from seeing his eyes, but his quaking shoulder betrayed it.

"Your hair, your eyes... the shape of your face, your gentleness, sometimes even the way you speak! It all reminded me so much of your mother that I... I couldn't stand to interact with you! I love you so much, my daughter... but you made me feel all of that horrible pain again that in my weakness, I chose to run from you. But you were mourning too, and hurt and confused... naturally, you sought your father. I'm sure you remember how well that went."

He laughed bitterly for a moment and then went silent, but Hinata spoke up before he could gather strength to keep going.

"I do. I remember _perfectly_."

Hinata knew she should've given him the time to recompose, but the words began to tumble out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

"You almost never spent any time eating with us... y-you handed my training to various other instructors, and I always thought it was because I wasn't worth it."

A sob racked her body, but Hinata tried to remain firm.

"Because I was too weak to learn from you. B-Because I was a failure... and you...!"

She really did!

"Y-You told me that! It took _years_ before I c-could train with you... I thought I had been improving! B-but you..."

"I crushed what little confidence you had managed to find. I know."

But it was so much stronger than her...

"I thought you hated me! For so long, I thought... I thought..."

"They say, Hinata," he found the strength to interrupt her, "that the road to hell is paved with the best intentions. We learn from our parents how to teach our children. What I learned from my father... was that hate could be an incredible motivator."

Her jaw fell. ' _No... no, you can't mean...!'_

He offered her such a pathetic smile. "When I was younger, I hated my father. That hate and my desire to prove myself were the only things that drove me forward for so many years... and it worked. Once I... recovered enough to handle being around you, I tried to repeat what had worked for me. I was so _stupid_...!" His fist pounded the ground. "The only thing I managed during all those months I spent with you was crushing what little confidence you had gained..."

He didn't have the heart to tell her she had actually regressed under his tutelage. It was his fault, but Hiashi knew she wouldn't accept that.

"Once I finally realized how wrong I was, I felt that it might've been better for you to have someone who could help you grow emotionally before you could progress in other areas. Someone capable of healing the damage I had done over the years. And that is when I began to... scheme, as you put it."

Hinata wiped her face and tried to keep her breathing under control. _'Focus, Hinata.'_

"I told your sensei she had been chosen by chance, merely because she had been available. That... was a lie. I asked Hokage-sama for help and in finding someone fitting, but even though he had assured me she was the best person for the job... I kept too much from him. I needed to be certain that she could aid you, and that's why I told her everything you overheard that day."

The logic train braked and threw Hinata out of the window, leaving her with a headache. "...I-I'm sorry, but what?"

"Those words were carefully planned to convey to her the environment you grew up in and how I... raised you. Damaged you. If she could sympathize or hopefully _empathize_ with you... that would ensure she'd be driven by much more than just her salary. She'd begin to genuinely care for you. That and," he chuckled without humor, "I thought perhaps spiting me would help."

"She hates you."

He didn't flinch at her coldness. "...I presumed as much."

Hiashi heard her footsteps. Though shame threatened to overwhelm him, though it still hurt to see so much of Hikari in Hinata... he looked up to face his judgment.

But she still had one last question.

"Why have you never said anything?"

Such an easy question, he thought.

"Because I am a coward. I was too afraid to feel... and then, I was too afraid to try. I thought I had lost my chance to be the father your mother had believed I could be, that I had hurt you enough and would only make everything worse if I tried. I kept Hanabi away because I was too afraid to make the same mistakes twice... because... because I am nothing but a failure..."

He crumbled. Throwing the last of his pride away, Hiashi allowed his forehead to meet the ground, staining it with his tears.

"I failed... you, your mother, your sister... but when I saw what could've been my last chance to makes things right, to repair the damage I had done... as uncertain as it was, I had to take it! But I knew I couldn't do this alone. Not anymore..."

He saw her feet.

"And so you came to me."

"Yes... that's the truth." He saw her knees. "I'm sorry... but that's the truth."

The only thing Hiashi could manage after that were ragged breaths, but that was fine. He had no more to speak... the only thing left to do was wait for his sentence.

And wait he did. The silence almost made him go mad, but Hinata found her answer eventually.

"Congratulations," she began in a wavering, wounded tone. "Y-You did it..."

He felt his daughter's small hands on his shoulders, gently pushing him up until he, like her, was only kneeling. But he kept his eyes on the ground.

"Until today... no. Not until today," she sniffed, shaking her head. "I think I've always tried to hold it back... to repress it. I didn't want to believe it but now... n-now I can say for sure."

She came closer, walking with her knees. When he dared to look in her eyes, he found that he couldn't—Hinata became a blur.

And she hugged him, with all her strength.

"I hate you..." she whispered. "I hate you. I hate you! _I hate you_ _!_ "

Her words tore Hiashi apart, but he didn't hesitate in pulling her even closer, burying his face in her hair and hers on his chest.

"You _knew_ how much it hurt!"

She just cried harder.

"You _went_ through what I went and you did it to me anyways!"

"I'm sorry..." he whispered, over and over again.

"I hate you _so much!_ But... still...!"

"No. No...I deserve it, all of it. For never being a true father to you..."

She sniffed and pulled back, shaking her head. "Y-You were... w-when mother was alive, you were. And now! If you hadn't done anything, right now I... I..."

"I was almost too late."

"I don't care! Even after all of this... I hate you, but I don't! I still...!"

She choked on those words. Her heart was hurting too much to allow her to say it, but Hiashi understood—not hearing it was a fitting punishment.

And this time, knowing he wouldn't be pushed away, he brought her closer.

Hinata didn't resist.

Neither knew how much time they spent there on the ground, crying in each other's arms, falling apart under so many different and conflicting emotions. Perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, perhaps just a few seconds... for both of them, it felt like an eternity.

But eventually, the tears ceased to flow. Their breathing and heartbeats calmed, and Hiashi broke their silence.

"...Thank you, Hinata. For giving me this chance."

Sluggishly, she disentangled herself from him.

"Don't misunderstand," she warned, weakly. "I... can't forgive you. Not now... not yet."

She felt horrible, as one part of her wanted to forgive him, and another made her feel like an ungrateful, spoiled child for making such a fuss in front of the grave of someone who had endured a much harsher childhood.

But she couldn't find it in herself to forgive him yet. Her heart was still bleeding too much for that.

"I understand." Hiashi's hand brushed near her puffy eyelids and her cheeks, drying what remained of her tears. "I never expected you to. That you actually listened... that is enough for me. I can't ask for more."

...As much as it hurt, she couldn't help her smile.

"I listened. And... I swear," she rose. "I'll do what you asked. I'll search for someone who can deal with the seal while outside the village and I will... _consider_ our second option. But more importantly, I won't let this time you bought me go to waste."

And Hiashi, too, smiled despite the pain. Seeing Hinata's lavender eyes blazing with determination... she had never resembled her mother more than in that one moment.

"I'll do what I can to assist you," he promised. "Once you have more mastery over your affinity, I'll help you reserch its effects on our taijutsu."

She nodded quickly. "O-On that note... if you'll excuse me, I should go back to training."

"No." Hiashi got up, under his pained back's protests. "Hinata, you're in no state to be training."

"But I—"

"You look _drained_ , my daughter. I'm not sure you can see it, but our conversation took a toll on you... if you train right now, you'll not accomplish much. Knowing when to stop is a valuable skill to learn," he advised.

 _'I must look like a mess right now,'_ Hinata sighed, nodding reluctantly. _'I do feel tired, though.'_

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

"Go home. Take a bath, eat something and rest at least for the afternoon." His gaze shifted to the grave behind her, and he smiled fondly at it. "Your mother used to kick me out of my office and lock it up whenever she thought I was overworking myself... she could be quite scary when mad. You wouldn't want to upset her, would you?"

"No," Hinata laughed weakly. "I... will take it easy today."

He nodded. "I promise you that starting tomorrow, you can make up for the lost time by training with me and Hanabi in the afternoons. That is... if you want to."

"...I'd love to," she said, offering him a radiant smile. "Whenever I don't have a mission."

"Excellent," Hiashi nodded. Though the tug on his lips was new, she still recognized it as a dismissal nod.

"I'll be going then... father."

Hinata then walked away, leaving that one word to warm Hiashi's heart and not only remind him he didn't deserve the title or her respect... but that now he had a chance to earn them.

Though he still had duties as the clan head, he lingered in the graveyard. Someone needed to fix the mess _he_ had made—which would at least explain the brown stains in his clothes if anyone asked.

But more importantly... there was still one more person he had to apologize to.

* * *

Hinata stretched in her chair as a yawn took over. It was quite unsightly, as she felt no need to cover her wide-open mouth in the privacy of her dark room.

She wasn't alone, though. The small bundle of covers and brown hair on her bed betrayed Hanabi's presence, and the soft snoring was incontestable evidence the younger girl was in a deep sleep... as Hinata should've been, if she hadn't followed her father's advice a _bit_ too well and pushed the definition of "afternoon nap" to its limit.

In contrast to the previous night, Hinata had been too engrossed in her novel to sleep. Hanabi crashed at nine as she always did, but since Hinata was too awake, she had opened her window curtains slightly to leave her room less dark and went to read her recently-bought novel.

It was a bit of a struggle to read with nothing besides the night's "light" to aid her. She would've used her desk lamp, but it was a bit too bright for her to risk awakening Hanabi, so she soldiered on until enough time passed and the moon shone over the uncovered side of her window, bringing light.

Now that she was finally considering sleep again—though not before setting her alarm to Hanabi's awakening time instead of her usual—Hinata went to close her curtains but stopped, briefly to admire the night sky.

It was cloudless and filled to the brim with stars. That would've made for a beautiful image by itself, but like always, it was the moon who was the most eye catching figure in that painting. Big, round and shiny... a classic full moon.

Or so Hinata thought until she squinted her eyes and examined it a little closer.

The shape wasn't round. It was easy to miss, but the moon was beginning to wane... a thought that had always saddened her a bit.

 _"The moon isn't going to hide, Hinata-sama,"_ she remembered Ko laughing as he explained it to her younger self. _"You see, the moon has no light of its own, it only reflects the sun's. So when it's between our planet and the sun, it doesn't appear in the sky because there is no light to reflect. That's called a new moon..."_

Hinata had always identified with the moon from that point forward. A being without light, whose occasional shine was merely a reflection of someone else... and that, if it didn't have anyone to help it, was invisible to the world, despite its silence presence.

In a way, wasn't that her namesake? To the world... wasn't the moon but "a place in the sun"?

Still, despite the depressive note, she liked the moon. Even if she knew she was nowhere as beautiful or graceful as the real thing, being a moon had never bothered her... until that moment.

When she told herself that she would make her father proud, she was trying to reflect his light, the light of an accomplished fighter and leader.

When she told herself that she wouldn't give up on her training, she was trying to reflect Naruto's light. A light that kept shining no matter what tried to turn it dark.

When she told herself that she would be moving out of her comfort zone, she was accepting to reflect the light of her friends and teammates. The light of people who thought she could be like themselves, if only they gave her a little nudge.

When she told herself that she would accept losing her title for Hanabi's sake, she was allowing her sister's light to reflect on her, to show everyone which light was the sun they needed to be looking out for.

But now... being a moon was no longer acceptable. Not after all that Hiashi had shared with her.

 _'Father would be saddened, but it's nothing but my own life on the line. There's no light for me to reflect...'_

She needed her own light, not someone else's.

And when her eyes moved away from the moon, she knew exactly what she needed to be.

Not a moon... but a star.

Stars had their own light. From her perspective, they were so small... but they could shine without anyone's help, by their own merits. That's what mattered!

After all, if she were like the moon... she would drown in the darkness whenever there was no light source to keep her bright, just like the moon she had been admiring would in a few days.

That was no longer a possibility.

 _'From tomorrow onward,'_ she decided, _'I'll be doing this for me! Not for Hanabi, not for Naruto, not for my team or my friends... not for my father or mother.'_

And with that simple thought in her mind, she looked back at the moon. Borrowed light or not... she still liked the moon, and she offered it one last smile before closing her curtains.

It would be hard, but Hinata hoped that one day, even if she wasn't as bright as a sun, even if she was but a small dot in the night sky... she'd shine with her own light too.

* * *

A/N

This... was very hard to write. Very hard. I'm sure it was hard to read as well because of the emotional charge and the exposition woven in, but I hope you all enjoyed it! I wouldn't be able to do it without SimplePotato's help... cheers for him!

So! Between Neji's introduction, Hikari's past, the subversion of the "evil hive-mind council" trope fanon usually runs with, Hiashi's political gambit and his heavy heart-to-heart with Hinata, I'm sure there's lots to talk about, so please review! There are actually many things that didn't make the cut here and might—or not—show up in future Hyuuga-centric interactions, so feel free to ask if anything piqued your curiosity! (A bit of what led to the death of Hikari's father, in particular, pained me to cut... but it really didn't fit anywhere.)

Nonetheless! I'll be waiting to hear from you guys! Especially since... you won't be hearing from me for a while as I won't work on Chapter 21 anytime soon. I'll be taking the time off to work on a couple other projects while I don't have college, like searching for a job... but also, I'll be going back and revising past chapters.

I didn't actually get to do much last time I mentioned doing something like this, but I'll be taking a good, hard look at all that happened thus far to fix or improve anything that needs more polish, and focus in making earlier portrayals of characters more consistent. I'll also be trimming whatever content is not relevant to the fic anymore, especially in for Author Notes. I've gone past 300K words with this, but in reality, a good chunk is these notes (I'd wager at least 10%...)

Some stuff will be relocated to my profile, others will be cut entirely, and I'll be doing this to every A/N whenever I post each new update. (So these paragraphs will be cut when c21 goes live, for example)

I won't be doing anything besides mental planning for Chapter 21 until all past chapters are revised. This is important not only for making the story better as a whole, but because I'll be cross-posting it on AO3 after this, and will advertise it (properly) on Reddit as well. If anyone is curious, I'll try to leave a note about how far I am into the edition progress ("Chapter's edited: X/20" or something)

But I won't forget about continuing, and I hope you guys won't forget about me either and will drop a review for this one!

Next chapter, we are skipping a few months... except we aren't?! Hmm... mystery! But I'll throw you all a bone: you can look forward to Naruto+Hinata+ **Ramem**!

Thanks for reading thus far, and please... hearing from you guys is awesome, so if nobody minds I'll unsubtly beg for reviews again! #pleasefeedme!

* * *

Guest Review Answers!

Guest (02/07/17): Thank you very much!

Anya: Well, your C19 review requires no answer if you read the chapter. The C18 one, yeah. But sometimes we all doubt ourselves, don't we? It makes more sense from a "bigger picture" perspective and from a "Hinata" perspective, but Hiruzen at that moment was looking at it with a "Naruto" perspective, which made the decision not seem as good for a moment.


	21. Chapter 21 - Road to Suna, part 1

Hello everyone! Long time no see!

This fic's second anniversary is here, yay!

To celebrate, I decided to play with a couple scenes that have been in my mind for a while so that the date wouldn't pass by without any fanfare or news. I'm sorry to say this is just a small bonus chapter like Road to Wave was… I truly expected I'd have been long since done with my revision of this fic. It was supposed to be easy.

And then college happened, with this semester bringing a _ridiculous_ difficulty spike I never saw coming. That, plus how I severely underestimated how tough it would be to modify the past chapters to match the standards of quality I now work with (on top of making everything consistent with newer chapters), made my progress with the fic to slow down to a crawl.

Like I explained in the last few chapters, I simply can't afford to fail in any subject in college, so I had to make that my absolute priority.

But I'm still alive and so is this fic. I'm afraid I can't promise when the next chapter is coming, but I can at least give you guys some fluff before I crawl back to my cavern. Like last time, there's a serious time skip going on.

Two extra notes before you begin:

1- _gio08_ has now joined the beta team alongside _SimplePotato,_ so now I only have 33% of credit on my chapters. Boo. Even worse for this one since my parents inspired some of the stuff you'll read. Boo!

2- **I have a really good fic to recommend to you guys,** but I'll only do so at the end. The last A/N is pretty lengthy, so if you don't care for my ramblings at least pay attention to the bolded bits down there.

* * *

 _Bonus Chapter 2_

Chapter 21 – Road to Suna, part 1 (v1.0)

* * *

When Hinata Uzumaki awakened to a sensation of unbearable heat, she immediately thought she was in the middle of the desert, suffering under the midday's brutal sunlight.

"Hnngh..."

But as her brain slowly started to work again, even if only a little bit, she realized she was in no desert. Her memory told her she was just in her bedroom in Konoha, and the heat was simple to blame on the summer that had been punishing the village for the last couple weeks.

Except there was another guilty party this time.

If the rhythmic breaths on the nape of her neck (something she only felt because her hair was up in a bun) and the presence against her back were any indication… Naruto had subconsciously decided to hug her from behind during their sleep, in a classic spooning position with his an arm draped over her waist.

Perhaps they even had gone to sleep like that, since the skies had decided to grace the village with rain while they were still up… but the lack of noise proved the rain didn't last, and Hinata could only wish it had stayed for a little while longer.

Cuddling up with her husband would've been all fine and dandy if Naruto wasn't a _furnace_. His body temperature was high and perfect for warming her up in the winter, especially since she felt cold so easily.

This was the opposite season.

Her skin was almost burning up where they touched, and her shirt—the only barrier between them—was drenched in a mix of their sweat.

Going back to sleep with that much discomfort was just impossible for Hinata, and on top of that, her bladder began to complain as well.

 _'I guess there's no way out... sorry, dear.'_

With all the care she could manage, Hinata slowly pried herself away from her husband's grasp.

"Nhh… 'nata…?"

She sighed. Naruto could easily sleep through an earthquake, but somehow she could never leave their bed without being caught. It always left her feeling a bit guilty.

"Where you goin'…?" he drawled coarsely, voice heavy with sleep.

"Just the bathroom," she replied while getting up, her own voice also deeper than normal.

"Ah… okay," he replied, feeling the bed and the sheets shifting as Hinata sat up on her side of the bed.

She patted the floor around her with her feet, trying and failing to locate her slippers. It crossed her mind to just use the Byakugan but a bout of laziness made her ignore that idea. Using her bloodline limit for something so trivial and simple was almost disgraceful… and she did find the slippers after a couple seconds.

Sure, the room was really dark as it was likely very early in the morning, but she knew the layout like the back of her hand.

 _'Besides,'_ she thought as she got up, _'who needs a Byakugan just for moving around in their own room?'_

…

"Wah!"

A loud thud followed her yelp, and Hinata's butt was on the floor.

Apparently, she did.

"Hinata! What's wrong?!" Naruto materialized by her side, though he was still on the bed. "Are you hurt? What happened?"

"Ouch… no, I'm fine. I just slipped," she said while rubbing her backside, and a laugh then escaped her lips. "Stumbling around my own bedroom like a true ninja, right?"

Naruto let his worried frown melt into a smirk at her humorous tone. "What did you slip on anyway?"

"Good question…"

This time Hinata didn't shun her dojutsu. Her eyesight flashed almost instinctively, and she picked up something from the floor with flat disbelief written all over her face.

"It was my bra."

He blinked. Why would that be on the floor…?

"And it's torn."

"…Oh."

Naruto let out an embarrassed laugh as some _interesting_ memories of the last night flooded his mind. "So… this is all my fault, huh?"

She snickered at him. "Probably, but I did slip on it just now."

"That's also kinda on me…"

"Well… I guess that's true," she got up. "But don't worry, Naruto. I'm fine, I'm not mad, and I can probably sew it back somehow."

"But still—"

He felt her lips press against his forehead.

"It's nothing important," she said. "Now, what I have to do in the bathroom? Very important."

Hearing Hinata's footsteps echoing away, Naruto crawled back to his part of the bed.

 _'Well… at least I know what kind of souvenir to bring back,'_ he thought.

As the adrenaline from the scare earlier died down, Naruto almost fell asleep again in the two minutes Hinata took to relieve herself, briefly jolting awake when she waltzed back into the room. To his surprise, she didn't go back to the bed and instead walked past it.

His confusion disappeared almost completely when he heard her open his side of the wardrobe, and he had to smirk again.

There was only one reason she would do that, and if his guess was right, Hinata was walking around just in her panties.

"Y'know, you've gotta be more subtle when stealing other people's stuff. Wasn't the shirt you had on enough?"

"Consider this payback for the bra," she shot back playfully. "Besides, these shirts are all _mine_ and you know it."

Naruto snorted. He didn't mind her thievery; it's not like he wore his pajama shirts unless it was outright snowing nowadays, but he couldn't help himself

"Might as well call them dresses if they are _so_ yours."

"Yes!" Hinata giggled at his jab as she went back to her side of the bed. "They are big enough to reach my knees after all—it's the second biggest reason why I love using them."

Naruto felt her sinking on the mattress and turned to face her in the darkness, barely making out her shape. "Really? Then what's the first?"

"…They smell just like you."

Grinning widely, he scooted closer to his wife.

"Heh…. y'know, if that's the problem then I have a better ide—"

To his shock, Hinata gently pushed his arm away when he tried to embrace her.

"I-I think the shirt will be enough for now…"

"Hinata? What did I do?"

"Naruto, you didn't do anything wrong. It's just… you're too hot. I can't handle it right now."

Slowly and with an edge of smugness, the grin returned to his face and Naruto allowed his tone to drop to a lower pitch as he whispered his next words.

"So you think I'm hot, huh…"

He heard a muffled noise coming from her, and he just _knew_ her cheeks were reddening.

"Y-You… I didn't mean it like that," she huffed, half-amused and half-annoyed. "We should go back to sleep now, dear."

"Hmm... hold on, I have an idea."

Hinata quirked an eyebrow when she heard two familiar poofs. "Why did you make clones?"

"You'll see. Actually, don't—just wait and don't use your Byakugan."

"…Okay?"

Confused, Hinata started to listen to the clones moving around. A mechanical buzz from above followed the sounds of the wardrobe being opened.

"The ceiling fan? Naruto, you know that's not a good idea."

"I've got a fix for it."

"Hmm…?"

Hinata closed her eyes and relaxed as the wind hit her skin, deciding to trust in her husband.

The ceiling fan they had recently installed above their bed might have seemed to be the perfect and obvious answer to the heat, but though the wind it made was nice and refreshing at first, even in the hottest of days it quickly left them both shivering from the cold.

She only understood Naruto's plan when she felt the weight of their bulkiest covers around her body. The ones they only used in the winter.

"There," Naruto said, closing the distance between them as the clones popped off. "Now you have no excuse."

"…You did that just to cuddle with me?"

"Yeah, this way I can warm you up instead of burning you alive."

Hinata broke out in a giddy laughter. "You're impossible!" she said gladly giving in to her husband's needy demands as he laughed with her.

They both shifted under the covers for a few moments. In the end Hinata had forsaken her pillow, finding it to be inadequate when compared to Naruto's chest, and his arm was wrapped up around her back to keep her as close as possible.

She felt warm, safe and comfortable.

"We gotta enjoy what time we still have," he tried to justify himself.

"I know. We'll be away from each other for so long and…"

A huge yawn made her trail off, and Naruto let out a small laugh.

"Let's just go back to sleep, okay?"

She closed her eyes. "Mhmm."

Naruto fell asleep almost immediately, and with his heartbeat as her personal lullaby, Hinata soon followed him.

* * *

Later that day, at around 2 p.m, Naruto and Hinata were sitting beside each other on the dining table of their household's living room. They had lunch almost an hour prior, and instead of food, the table was full of various kinds of medicine.

Hinata held a blister pack with red pills, and looked at N aruto expectantly.

"Uh… okay," he began, "so that one's the cold medicine."

"Right." She then took a transparent glass vial filled with golden-yellow liquid.

"That's for Hima's allergy to dust."

"Yes! And this one?"

He frowned at the little white bottle made of plastic, which hid its contents from view. "That's… for headaches, isn't it?"

Reluctantly, Hinata shook her head. "Fever, dear," she muttered and then pointed at another vial, one filled with white pills. "That one's for the headaches"

They sighed in unison, sharing a look of frustration. They had been doing this for almost half an hour already, and Naruto still couldn't remember what every medicine was meant for. He felt like an idiot, and he knew his dumbness was making his wife think she was at fault for not teaching him properly, making him feel even more moronic.

And they were almost running out of time.

Half-heartedly, Hinata then selected another vial, one made of a dark glass that masked the color of the red liquid inside.

"How about this?"

"Oh, that's easy! It's her throat medicine!"

Hinata's shoulders sagged, wiping off his confident grin. "Naruto, that's for stomachache."

"What? That can't be right. I know it's you that handles this stuff, but I remember that one." He snatched it from her hand to inspect it. "…Yup. It's that same stupid medicine I couldn't find anywhere when Hima had that throat infection two years ago."

She blinked confusedly. "Huh? But that… let me see it!"

"H-Hey!"

She practically tore the little container from his hand, almost dropping it in the process.

"You're right…! I mixed them up!"

With an uncharacteristically loud groan, Hinata let her head fall, hitting the table with noisy thump.

"Stupid. Stupid! Why did I throw the packaging away?!"

"Aw, come on." Naruto began to stroke her back with one hand in a feeble attempt to comfort her. "There's no need for all this drama."

" _Drama?!"_

She bolted upright, and his arm went limp. Naruto knew those were the wrong words the moment they made eye contact.

"Naruto, this is serious! How can you say that?!"

He gulped, feeling himself shrink. He was much taller than Hinata, but her rare glares always made him feel as small as an ant.

"What if something happens and you give her the wrong medicine because _I_ had you memorize the wrong things and—"

"Mom! I can't focus with you freaking out like this!"

Wincing, Hinata slowly turned in her chair to face the source of that outcry… and Naruto did the same right after silently sighing in relief.

Sitting on the nearby sofa was Boruto, their son. He had a pencil in his hand, an open book on his lap and a second one on the seat beside him—evidence he had been busy studying for an upcoming test.

Or at least, that he was trying to.

"I don't know why you two are doing this the hard way."

Boruto ripped a page from his book before getting up and dropping the book on the sofa. Without bothering to hide the storm cloud over his head, he marched up to his parents and offered the page to his mom.

She took it timidly. To her surprise, it was completely blank.

"Look," the boy began, "just jot down the name of each medicine and what it is for. Simple. Dad can't possibly mess that up, and you can look on the internet or call aunt Sakura if you aren't sure what one of them is for."

"That's… true."

"Hey, great idea son!" Naruto said, his volume drowning out Hinata's mumble. "We keep forgetting the internet is such a handy tool…"

Boruto raised an eyebrow. "How can you forget something like that, dad?"

"Don't gimme that look. Unlike you, we didn't grow up with the internet."

Scoffing, the younger Uzumaki was just about to go back to his books when Hinata grabbed his hand, making his eyes meet hers.

"I'm sorry for forgetting you were studying here, Boruto… mom didn't mean to make you upset."

There was a deep, unnamed emotion that Hinata's eyes and expression conveyed that Boruto simply couldn't handle. She made him feel like he had just kicked a puppy.

And then blew it up with an explosive kunai.

It was completely unfair.

"I… i-it's okay, mom. Really," he said, looking away. A subtle motion from his father brought his gaze to him instead, and Naruto's expectant stare only made him feel even worse.

He couldn't apologize—they'd go nowhere if he started that vicious cycle and he didn't think he was at fault anyways—but the solution quickly popped up in his mind.

"Mom, your primary and secondary elements are Water and Lightning, right?"

"Uh… yes?"

"So… there's this difficult problem in my book and I tried to solve it but I had no luck and, well… maybe you could help?"

When Hinata didn't answer right away, still caught off-guard by the seemingly random question, Naruto placed a hand on her shoulder to give her a little push.

"Go on," he offered her an encouraging smile. "I'll solve our mess here, so go help him!"

"But…"

Seeing her still hesitant, Naruto did a dirty trick: he summoned a few clones to pick up the medicines and left the room.

"Mom?"

Now without a choice, Hinata got up and offered him a small smile. "Sure, let's see if I can help you."

"Yes! C'mon."

She followed him to the sofa. Boruto picked up the book that had been on the unoccupied seat and sunk into the sofa, flipping a couple pages before offering her the book. "Here, it's question 4 of the advanced section. Sensei said the test wouldn't cover those, but I thought that it could help anyway.."

What Boruto hadn't realized before, was that his mother's smile had been nothing but a mask. On the inside, Hinata was trembling.

 _'I'm totally going to embarrass myself here… I was never any good with academics to begin with, and the curriculum nowadays is so much harder than in my time!'_

Resisting the urge to gulp, she sat down and read the question aloud.

"Ninja X, an Earth-specialist, was given a mission from his Kage to hunt down two missing-nin named Y and Z, known for their use of Lightning and Water respectively as well as their ability to execute a combined ninjutsu with these natures. Considering the relationship between these three chakra natures and assuming that all jutsu involved are of the same strength, which alternative below correctly explains how a defensive Earth jutsu from X would interact with that combined ninjutsu from Y and Z? Justify your answer... hmm."

While Hinata scanned said alternatives, Boruto began to share his thoughts, scowling at his feet.

"I know Earth is good against Water and weak to Lightning, but I _also_ know Water and Lightning work really well together… so I'm torn between 'the techniques cancel each other' and 'Y and Z's combined ninjutsu wins'. I'm sure it's one of the two."

"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure," Hinata replied with what Boruto could only describe as a cheeky grin. "This is the right one."

He craned his neck to peek at the book, where Hinata's finger was. "Uh, 'X's Earth ninjutsu wins'? But how?"

"You see, Lightning jutsu aren't "just strong", most of them pack a lot of energy and focus it on small areas, almost like a spear. That's how they beat Earth. But when mixing it with Water, the Lightning chakra becomes disperse in the Water chakra…"

"Ah! It loses that piercing power and does basically nothing against to help against an Earth Wall or something like that, right?!"

"Exactly!" Hinata beamed at her child with pride, returning the book to him. "It's a good combo to make Water techniques more harmful and increase the Lightning's area-of-effect, but it's not a complete upgrade like Fire and Wind are. There's a trade-off."

"I'd never have thought of that… hah, I bet nobody in the class would get this one right!" he snickered to himself while jotting down the answer. Hinata couldn't help but be reminded of how a young Naruto looked while planning out his pranks.

She was so distracted by the sheer irony of that thought that was that she was caught by surprise when Boruto suddenly hugged her.

"Thanks mom! You're the best!"

Hinata had no qualms about reciprocating. "Oh, it was nothing. I'm just glad I was able to help you for once! You're such a smart boy, I never have the chance to do this with you anymore."

Boruto felt himself blushing. "I-I'm not th—"

"Aw, mom! that's not fair!"

Surprised, two looked behind them and barely managed to catch a glimpse of Himawari on the doorway before she flew to embrace them, almost knocking the sofa down.

"I'll be away for an entire week and he's the one getting the hugs?"

"She's my mom too, spoiled princess."

The girl stuck her tongue out. Both were smirking playfully.

Hinata giggled while looping one arm around her daughter's neck and pulled her in as best as she could.

A bright flash caught the trio off-guard.

"This one," Naruto announced, holding up an orange cell phone, "I'll have framed and on my office's desk when I return."

"Ugh, dad!" Boruto groaned, innocently burying his flushed face in Hinata's chest out of shame while the Uzumaki patriarch laughed merrily. "Don't take people's photos without warning!"

"I'd appreciate a warning next time as well…" Hinata muttered, clutching Boruto closer. Whether it was to shield him or herself, not even she knew for sure.

"Well, that's what happens when you start a family hug without me!"

"Dad, dad! Take another one with just me!"

Himawari went around the sofa, twirling to showcase herself to everyone. "I put a lot of work in my outfit today!"

The girl honestly had expected a lot of praise. Her yellow skirt and white open-toed sandals were brand new, and though her short-sleeved shirt wasn't anything special, she thought the stamp was cute… so what could go wrong?

Contrary to her expectations, Naruto's grin faded into a frown. "Um… Hima? Are you really going with a skirt that short? And that kind of sandals?"

"What's wrong with them? The skirt stops at the knee, isn't that fine?"

"Hima, we're going to a village in the middle of the desert. A sunny, sandy, _windy_ desert."

"…Oh."

"There's another issue too," Hinata said. "Your skin color is the same as always."

The girl blinked twice before slapping her forehead. "Ugh, the sunscreen!"

"Heh. Airhead."

Himawari shot her best glare at her brother. "Nobody asked you anything!"

"You should've paid more attention to that TV Spe—"

"Enough, you two," Hinata said, releasing Boruto and getting up. "Let's go upstairs, Hima. Mom will help you."

With an exaggerated sigh, the girl followed her mother out of the room. Naruto, for his part, went to sit where Hinata had been.

Boruto still had his head buried in a book though he wasn't truly focusing on it yet. "So… how did it go with aunt Sakura?"

Naruto answered with an embarrassed chuckle. "Your aunt was mad at me, so nothing unusual." This time, however, it was completely warranted. He knew he should've gotten half of medicine duty instead of dropping it fully on Hinata. "She did give me what I needed though. Got it all on that paper, and the clones already packed all the medicine with the rest."

"Hmm."

The two spent a little while in silence, Boruto studying, and Naruto admiring him. Much like Hinata, Naruto couldn't help the pride he felt in seeing his child succeeding where he had once failed so hard.

The boy eventually felt the stare and aimed a wary glance at his father. "Why are you smiling like that, dad?"

"Nothing. Just watching you work."

"Feels like you're enjoying my suffering before you run off with Hima."

Naruto felt his smile disappear. "…You really wanted to go too, huh?"

"I definitively don't want to spend the entire week drowning in books, if that's what you're asking."

"Ugh. I know this stuff is boring, and if my trip wasn't part-business I'd have waited 'til your tests were over, but…"

"I know, I know," Boruto sighed. "Your talks with the Kazekage can't wait. But at least you'll get that promise you made to Hima out of the way." He then aimed a glare at his father, almost as if their roles were reversed. "You _better_ make time for her during the trip. She's really been looking forward to it."

"Don't worry," Naruto smirked. "I've made a deal with the Kazekage, we won't be meeting up every day."

"Good."

"But you gotta do your part too, you know?"

Boruto met his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"I understand you'll be busy with these," Naruto pointed at the books, "but take care of your mom while I'm away, okay? She's been on the edge because of the trip, as you saw earlier."

Scoffing, the boy rolled his eyes. "Of course I'll take care of mom. I don't get why she's so worried about this, though…"

"We parents just can't help but worry when our kids are out of sight and out of reach—you'll get it when your turn comes."

Boruto frowned, refusing to look up. "Then why aren't you acting like that too if—augh, my hair! Stop messing it up, dad!"

Chuckling, Naruto removed his hand from the boy's hair. "Don't be silly, Boruto! You're older and more dependable than your sister, Konoha is a safer place with a lot of people we know and, well," he looked away, "your mom is a bit better at this parenting business than I am. So I worry, I just don't have to worry as much. Oh, and I'm still here—that kinda helps for now."

"Hmph. If you say so."

Battling with conflicting emotions, Boruto decided to just go back to his book.

"Boys, we're back," Hinata announced herself, entering the room with Himawari in tow. They walked around the sofa.

Himawari carefully placed her pink backpack on the ground and once again spun in place. "How about this?"

"Now that's more like it," Naruto nodded to himself. She had traded the skirt for a pair of jeans, the sandals for a semi-new pair of shoes, and all the skin she still displayed was now resembling her mother's pale tone thanks to the sunscreen.

Boruto offered her a thumbs-up. "Looking good, Hima!"

"Hehe, thanks!"

"Well then," Naruto heaved himself out of the sofa. "I guess it's time to go if we're both ready. You sure you didn't forget anything, Hima?"

"Yeah! Mom and I checked again just now."

"And are you sure you're not bringing anything that isn't yours," Boruto said, gazing at the girl with suspicion.

She smirked, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "It's not like you'd be able to play videogames even if I brought them with me."

"Enough you two," Naruto clapped to get their attention. "Let's go already."

* * *

Instead of moving to the front door as one would expect in such a situation, the Uzumaki family went to their backyard. Unlike the decorated garden at the building's entrance, their yard was plain and simple, perfect for the kids to play around without risking any flower's life, while also having enough space to host a family-friends meeting on special days.

In the middle of the yard were the two clones Naruto had summoned earlier, crouched on the grass as they examined a complex sealing array they had painted on a square patch of brown earth of about three square meters of area, which was almost completely covered by ink.

A three-pronged kunai was buried in the middle of the seal.

"Boss, it's ready to go!"

"Good. Get me the scroll."

While one clone simply poofed away, the other got up and went to grab a scroll on a nearby table before dismissing itself after Naruto took the scroll.

One minute later, and Himawari's backpack was sealed inside, along with Naruto's things.

"Alright, this is it."

At Naruto's words, the family of four split into two separate groups to say their goodbyes. While Himawari dove in to hug Hinata, Naruto just crouched in front of Boruto with his arms spread, an invitation that the boy didn't refuse.

"Bye dad. Take care."

"Same for you, son. Show those tests tomorrow who's boss, okay!?"

Boruto broke the hug, smirking in a way that mirrored his father. "Leave it to me!"

"And don't forget our talk from earlier."

"I won't, I promise."

The two shifted towards their girls just in time to see Hinata kissing Himawari on the forehead, their brief conversation just ending.

"And make sure your dad eats his vegetables and isn't living just from ramen, okay?"

"Count on me, mom!"

"Oi, I resent that."

Mother and daughter shared a laugh at Naruto's expense… but as Hinata was still crouched and a little bent over to match Himawari's height, the angle coupled with how the gravity pulled a bit at her clothes made the little girl see quite a bit more of skin than she had been able to.

And that sparked her curiosity.

"Mom?"

"Yes, sweetie?"

"What are those purple bruises all over your neck?"

"…"

Making a noise that one could only describe as a "meep", Hinata sprung to her full height and pulled her collar upwards as the blood rushed all over her face. Her lavender eyes were as wide as saucers… much like Naruto's smirk as he watched the scene unfolding.

"Did something happen, mom?" Boruto asked with innocent worry.

"N-N-No! N-Nothing happened! I... I mean, y-yes, it did, but… but it was just… a bug!" she blurted out, trying to smile through her embarrassment. "Yes, just a bug."

She felt proud of that excuse.

"A bug did all of that?" Himawari asked, frowning.

"Yes! Of course. J-Just a bug."

"Hmm."

Relief flooded Hinata's system as she scanned her children's faces—they were buying it. She could feel her blush receding…

"A bug that had a lot of _fun_ sucking on that neck last night, right?"

…only for it to return redder than ever before at Naruto's words and the smugness dripping from his tone.

"Did you at least get the bug for mom?" Boruto asked with crossed arms, noting that his mom was avoiding everyone's gaze.

"Not before the bug got the best of her in other places, no."

Himawari was pretty sure she was seeing (and hearing) steam pouring out of her mom's ears while her brother scolded their father, but before she had the chance to ask Hinata what was wrong she felt a big hand on her shoulder.

"Go say your goodbyes to your brother, okay?"

The little girl was gently pushed along before she had the chance to fight back, leaving husband and wife only a meter apart from each other, a distance that Naruto quickly closed.

Hinata still refused to look up.

"Hey."

"…Jerk."

"What, so that's the goodbye I'm getting?"

"…"

Boruto, who was watching the two, couldn't help but shake his head. From the scowl on his mother's cherry-red face and the way she was trembling, he knew his dad was in hot water. He would've kept watching, if not for someone almost tackling him to the ground.

"Hey, watch it!"

"Aw, don't be so grumpy!"

Boruto almost snarled back a reply, but Himawari silenced his complaints with a loud smooch on his cheek.

"Good luck on your tests! I'll be rooting for you!"

"…D-Dammit," he looked away as she broke the hug, unable to handle the absurd levels of adorable that his sister could reach.

He settled for hugging her again, if only to hide his blush.

"I won't forgive you if you don't end up having lots of fun out there, you hear?"

"…What a weird thing to say."

"S-Shut up and let me hug you in peace, you brat!"

Despite their bickering, the two siblings spent a fair while enjoying the last bit of warmth they'd feel from each other until the week was over.

That is, until the silence allowed them to overhear some faint, wet noises coming from somewhere nearby.

Himawari was just about to look in that direction when Boruto clamped his hands over her eyes.

"D-don't look," he whispered.

"What is it?" she whispered back.

"…Dad and mom forgot we're here again."

"Oh. They're doing that weird kiss thing?"

"Yeah, that gross stuff with their tongues."

Boruto shuddered. He'd never understand adults.

"Um… since I can't see anything, can you take me to the bathroom?"

The boy groaned as he led her back inside. "Don't leave that stuff to the last minute! Bah, c'mon…"

* * *

An unknown amount of time passed between the two siblings leaving the yard and the moment when Naruto and Hinata disentangled themselves from each other, connected only by a thin bridge of saliva that soon broke apart.

They spent the following seconds in silence, doing nothing besides filling their lungs with air again and staring each other in the eye, engaging in a silent conversation.

One that Naruto eventually forced himself to stop indulging in, lest he found an excuse to stay home for a few extra hours.

"So, am I forgiven?"

"I… I'll think about your case."

Naruto snorted, but his reply died in his mouth when he noticed they were alone. "Where are the kids?"

"Hmph, so you two are finally done?"

Boruto and Himawari re-entered the yard, the boy made no effort to hide his annoyance.

"You really have guts dad, to make the Kazekage wait for you like that."

"…Aw, dammit! We're going to be late—come on Hima!"

Giggling, the girl quickly dashed to the sealing array on their yard, and Naruto would have followed if not for a small hand clamping on his wrist.

He turned to Hinata. "What is it?"

Her answer was to fiddle with the collar of his shirt, fixing the mess she had accidentally made instants before. "There."

"Heh, thanks."

"Say hi to the Kazekage for me," she said, giving him one final quick, chaste kiss that lasted less than a second.

"Sure thing!"

The instant Naruto joined his daughter above the sealing array, the entire thing began to glow a bright orange as it reacted to his chakra. He then began to weave a long, complicated sequence of hand signs that took him almost a full minute to get through.

 _'There!'_

Electricity began to gather around Naruto and Himawari, and they offered one last wave and goodbye to their fellow Uzumaki before a _massive_ column of orange lightning engulfed them.

When the flash dispersed, the two were gone.

Hinata and Boruto stood in the empty yard for a few more seconds until Boruto slumped with a heavy sigh.

"Guess I've got no choice but to hit the books again, huh?"

Hinata took his defeated expression with an unnaturally innocent smile.

"Well, you can do something else whenever you want to. As long as you aren't in range of my Byakugan, that is."

The boy gulped. That was a lesson he would not forget anytime soon.

"But," she raised a finger, "if I see you dedicated yourself enough today, we could have hamburgers for dinner. What do you th—"

Suddenly, Hinata was alone in the yard.

 _'So predictable!'_ she thought, laughing.

Surely enough, when she went back to the living room, Boruto was neck-deep into his book, looked more focused than ever.

"Boruto, dear, mom will take a little nap before dinner, okay?"

"Sure," he answered without even looking at her.

Confident that he would be too fearful of a trap to dare to test his luck against her Byakugan, Hinata left to her bedroom.

She had a revenge to plan.

* * *

A/N:

And that's all for now, folks!

The next part will come ONLY after I wrap up the following two arcs, and unless I get a good idea in the coming months, don't expect a bonus chapter for the next anniversary. Hopefully it will just be a normal update. (I'm also waiting for the anime/manga to give me material before I work my headcanons about new age!Suna in part 2 here, if you must know.)

So. About future chapters… like I said above, I'm struggling to even work on my revision, let alone future updates. And after reading some of the older chapters, I know I just can't let them stay like they are. I need to fix them.

I wanted to say that my last batch of tests will be mid-december, so by then I should be picking up speed… but I'm going to gift myself a Nintendo Switch with Fire Emblem Warriors after graduating, which will likely eat a massive amount of my time. Luckily for you guys I won't pick up Super Mario Odyssey anytime soon, and until we get more info on the 2018 releases I have nothing I want to buy for the Switch in the future. This is probably the last update of the year.

Does that leave you guys without any content? Yes and no.

Since you guys made it this far, I think I can assume you liked this fic. Well, I can assure you that you'll like the revised version even more! There are various new scenes and rewritten segments I'm sure will make a re-read very enjoyable. Especially since the first chapters were pretty bad… at least to me. I don't know how you guys stomached them.

 **That's not to say it will be necessary to read the fic again, though!**

I'm working so that nobody will miss any relevant information should they ignore my revised material despite the new things I've woven in, but if you guys want, you can google for this fic on Archive of Our Own and follow it from there so you get a notification each time I post a "new" chapter.

And maybe leave comments to give me the motivation to speed up the production… hehe. I mean, seriously. Ao3 barely gives me any feedback—probably because my fic isn't slash _ —and I'm only left to wonder if this revision is worth it. Well, this is also a chance you guys have to suggest fixes to anything that bothered you about this fic. Lacking Team 8 dynamics, for example (which is my greatest pre-Wave problem).

I'm hoping that once I'm past the early Wave chapters, the revisions will come along much faster since the quality will go up as I advance and I I'll DEFINITIVELY not make significant changes to the fight scenes (they were enough of a childbirth the first time around already). But I can't promise when the next update will come, sorry.

Hope to see at least a couple of you on AO3! (Or just here again, but you'll have to keep checking my profile for the revised updates since they don't come with e-mails.)

Oh…I was going to address a couple concerns/guest reviews from the last chapter, but that will work better when the revised version is up.

And talking about the last chapter, I must thank everyone that sent feedback to me! I'm super happy with the reception—I still can't believe I got some of you to cry alongside Hinata and Hiashi there! You all rock! And netted me over 500 Favs somewhere along the way, too!

I wish I could have a better thank you present than this, but… better than just an author's note in between months of silence, right?

Please, if you have anything to say about this bonus chapter, I'm all ears! I hope you guys liked it!

 **Lastly, about that fic recommendation I talked about earlier** … it's named **Mystic Eyes of Reincarnation** by **Planeshunter.** It's about a Hinata that never truly pursued Naruto and instead became the leader of her clan… only to rewind time with a little help from Kurama one day after Naruto dies during their adulthood, going back to Part 1 to mess with everything.

Sounds dark? It's not. It's actually one of the more amusing fics I've ever read. Hinata's thought process/the narration is usually quite funny and she acts like a mix of Adult Hinata, Adult Hinata trying to sell herself as a believable Young Hinata, and Adult Hinata being hit full-force by the hormone rush of her preteen years (this is never outright stated in the story, but there's no other explanation for some of her reactions).

The fic's an antithesis to my own: fast updates, short chapters. It should keep you guys busy while I patch the holes of this story, I guarantee it. It's a quality work.

And now, I'm off.

But not before begging for reviews again! (*points a cognitive gun at you*) Please remember to **review!**

Your support will definitively help me graduate!


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